Mondo Duplantis Has Become Part Athlete, Part Entertainment Brand

Most elite athletes have a walkout song. Mondo Duplantis wrote and performed the entire soundtrack for a championship.

World Athletics released "Gold," the official anthem for the inaugural Ultimate Championship, on August 21, credited to Duplantis alongside co-writers Carl Silvergran and Oscar Chase, with Chase also producing the track.

It's out on every major streaming platform, has its own music video shot around Budapest, and Duplantis is scheduled to perform it live in the stadium to close out the championship on September 13.

This isn't a walk-on, it's a closing ceremony built around him.

The trust behind the decision

That's a remarkable amount of institutional trust to hand a single athlete, and it's worth asking how he got there.

Duplantis isn't just good at pole vault, he's been the dominant, defining figure in the event for years, a two-time Olympic champion who keeps breaking his own world record seemingly every few months.

But dominance alone doesn't usually earn you creative control over how a championship brands itself.

What's different here is that Duplantis has spent years quietly building a parallel identity as a musician, writing and producing between Stockholm and his childhood home in Louisiana, racking up more than eleven million Spotify streams before World Athletics ever asked him to write an anthem.

When Sebastian Coe's organization went looking for someone to define this new event's sound, they weren't taking a gamble on an athlete moonlighting. They were hiring someone with an actual body of musical work.

A new kind of athletic stardom

This says something bigger about how track and field's biggest stars now operate compared to a generation ago.

It used to be enough to win and give a good post-race interview.

Increasingly, the athletes who become genuinely powerful within their sport are the ones who build something adjacent to their competition, a personal brand, a media presence, in Duplantis's case an entire second creative discipline, that a federation can then plug directly into its marketing.

There's a cynical read on this, which is that World Athletics is simply using a genuinely popular athlete to paper over the fact that the sport still struggles for mainstream cultural relevance outside major championships.

Handing Duplantis the anthem and the closing ceremony feels less like organic fan connection and more like a federation borrowing star power it hasn't built institutionally.

An honest strategy

But there's also something refreshingly honest about it compared to how other sports handle their biggest stars.

Coe's own framing, that the Ultimate is "purposefully designed to showcase the talents and passions of our sport's biggest stars, on and off the track," is at least explicit about the strategy rather than pretending an anthem organically emerged from nowhere.

Is this smart, modern sports marketing that plays to an athlete's actual talents, or does it risk making Budapest feel more like a Duplantis promotional vehicle than a championship for the entire sport?