Mondo Duplantis’s “Gold” Gives World Athletics Ultimate Championship Its Soundtrack

What inspired the song?

Duplantis said he wrote “Gold” around the idea of representing something bigger than oneself: family, teammates and coaches. He also described music and sport as ways of bringing people together.

That theme gives the song a broader role than a promotional tie-in. The Ultimate Championship is being presented as a showcase for athletics’ leading competitors, while “Gold” translates the event’s medal-focused identity into a piece of music created by one of its headline athletes.

How “Gold” will be used at the Ultimate Championship

World Athletics plans to weave “Gold” into the championship’s broadcast and in-stadium presentation. Duplantis is scheduled to perform the song live after the final day’s competition on Sunday, 13 September.

The event itself will take place in Budapest across three evening sessions. It is designed to bring together Olympic, world and Diamond League champions for a new biennial “champion of champions” competition. Individual-event gold medalists are set to receive $150,000, within the championship’s overall $10 million prize fund.

World Athletics president Sebastian Coe framed the championship as a platform for athletes’ talents and passions both on and off the track. That makes Duplantis a particularly natural choice for the anthem: he is not only one of the sport’s most recognisable active competitors but also an athlete with an existing recording career.

Why the Lausanne result raises the stakes

The “Gold” announcement followed one of Duplantis’s most significant competitions of the season. On 20 August in Lausanne, he won the Diamond League city pole-vault event with a clearance of 6.21 metres, improving his own meeting record of 6.15m. He cleared every height before taking two attempts at 6.32m—one centimetre above his 6.31m world record—and ended the attempt after the second miss.

The contest was unusually close because Greece’s Emmanouil “Manolo” Karalis cleared 6.16m. That was the second-best vault of Karalis’s career, behind his 6.17m mark that places him second on the world all-time list behind Duplantis.

Duplantis had already beaten Karalis five days earlier at the European Championships in Birmingham, winning a fourth consecutive outdoor title with a championship-record 6.15m. Karalis finished second with 6.00m.

The real storyline in Budapest

Duplantis remains the clear favourite on the evidence of the current rankings: his 6.31m world record tops the 2026 outdoor list, while Karalis’s 6.17m ranks second. But Lausanne showed why the pole vault could become one of the Ultimate Championship’s defining head-to-head contests rather than a routine win for the record-holder.

That is what makes “Gold” strategically significant for the new event. The song gives World Athletics a recognisable audio identity, while Duplantis’s recent 6.21m victory, world-record attempt and rivalry with Karalis provide a competitive narrative behind the promotion. When Duplantis performs the anthem in Budapest, he will be closing an event in which he is both part of the entertainment and one of its principal sporting attractions.