Mondo Duplantis broke Sergey Bubka‘s 26-year-old outdoor pole vault world record, clearing 6.15 meters at a Diamond League meet in Rome on Thursday.
Duplantis, the Swede who was born and raised in Louisiana, already held the overall pole vault world record, which he broke on consecutive Saturdays in February in indoor meets and raised to 6.18 meters.
Outdoors, Duplantis took 14 unsuccessful attempts at 6.15 meters in the last two months before clearing on his second try in Rome.
“Everybody kept talking about it, it was a big chip on my shoulder and I feel I had to do it to have people stop asking me this question,” Duplantis said, according to meet organizers. “When I did it, it was more relief than joy.”
Duplantis, a 20-year-old with a Swedish mom and American dad, turned professional last year after one season at LSU. He took silver at last year’s world championships behind American Sam Kendricks.
The Ukrainian Bubka broke the outdoor world record 17 times in the 1980s and ‘90s, including by one centimeter on nine occasions from 1988-1994, taking advantage of bonus money each time he raised it.
Full Rome results are here. The Diamond League season concludes in Doha on Sept. 25.
In other events in Rome, Rio Olympic champion Elaine Thompson-Herah clocked the world’s fastest women’s 100m in the world this year, 10.85 seconds.
Thompson-Herah, fifth and fourth at the last two world championships, supplanted fellow Jamaican Olympic champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, who clocked 10.86 in Kingston on Aug. 22. Fraser-Pryce was not in the Rome field.
Norwegian Karsten Warholm won the 400m hurdles in 47.07 seconds, the ninth-fastest time in history. Warholm, the second-fastest ever in the event, has been chasing American Kevin Young‘s world record of 46.78 from the 1992 Barcelona Olympics all season.
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