Armand Duplantis will be among the reigning Olympic champions adding star power to the world indoor championships this weekend when the Chinese city of Nanjing hosts the first major global athletics meet since the Paris Games last year.
The three-day event was originally slated for 2020 and faced multiple postponements due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Nanjing’s Sports Training Center would finally welcome more than 570 athletes for the start of the showpiece today.
One of the main attractions would be pole vaulter “Mondo” Duplantis, who soared 6.27m to break the world record for a staggering 11th time in Clermont-Ferrand last month.
Photo: AP
“I’m super excited,” said the Swede, who impressed fans in China during the two Diamond League meets last year.
Duplantis, who would be gunning for a third straight world indoor title, said that although he does not dwell on how much higher he can go, he would like to scale 6.30m soon.
“Indoors is a great opportunity always to break the world record, because we don’t have to deal with the wind and whatnot, so we have a lot more controlled variables,” the 25-year-old added.
Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen would be going for a 1,500m and 3,000m double on the track — a feat achieved only once at the indoor worlds by Ethiopian great Haile Gebrselassie in 1999.
The Olympic 5,000m champion, fresh off a similar double at the European indoors, said there woud be little room for error.
“People are a little more stressed when it comes to indoors because the track is half the size with usually the same amount of competitors,” the 24-year-old said.
“Many people feel like they have only half as much time to do the things they want to do. That’s the thing that I’m aware of in my approach to indoor races, is that I always try to do things with a little bit extra margin,” he said.
Nanjing is to crown a new world indoor champion with Christian Coleman of the US missing from the men’s 60m sprint, while Italian Zaynab Dosso heads the women’s field after her 7.01-second effort at the Europeans.
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