An astonishing year full of gold medals and world records has left the pole vaulter believing new frontiers are still possible

We are sitting in a swish Parisian hotel, Mondo Duplantis and I, but his mind is elsewhere. It’s on the runway. Then high in the sky. Bending, arching and twisting over another impossible peak, six metres up and the rest. At the precise point where he knows he has shattered the world record again.

So what are those milliseconds like? “Every one brings a different type of emotion,” he replies. “But in some way, it’s the same. It’s a kind of hysteria.”