On April 1, at the Texas Relays, he vaulted 19 feet 4 1/4 inches, a national high school record, a world junior record
and the highest jump at any level of international competition so far in this outdoor season.
Sam Kendricks of Oxford, Miss., the 2016 Olympic bronze medalist
and a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve, said he supported Duplantis’s decision as a “very professional way of looking at it.”
“He’s got dual citizenship; he’s proud of his mother’s heritage,
and he’s proud of his American heritage,” said Kendricks, who has known Duplantis and his family for years.
Kendricks, the Olympic bronze medalist, calls him pole vaulting’s “book of knowledge.”
“Tell him I said, ‘You’re no longer a high school jumper in my head; you’re a competitor,’” Kendricks said.
Duplantis, who hopes to vault 19 feet 8 1/4 inches this year — just over six inches shy of
Lavillenie’s world record — speaks in a sober, businesslike manner of his career goals.
Casey Carrigan, a pole-vaulter from Orting, Wash., made the Olympic team for the 1968 Mexico City Games as a 17-year-old
and later set a national high school record of 17 feet, 4 3/4 inches, but his jumping career settled into anticlimax.
Armand Duplantis — known as Mondo — is the only high school vaulter to have cleared 19 feet, and he has already done it twice this year.