Mondo is writing and recording an original theme song for the World Ultimate Championships.

That’s as close as we come in track and field to a sentence that would be entirely indecipherable to a person even 10 years ago. In 2016, Mondo was better known as a track surface as opposed to a person. Anything called the “Ultimate Championships” would have likely been a team frisbee tournament where adults with full-time jobs competed for a plastic trophy and Dick’s Sporting Goods gift cards on a wide stretch of beach along the Jersey Shore. There would have been little reason for either of these concepts to require a theme song.

But today, when we read and ruminate on that statement—Mondo is writing and recording an original theme song for the World Ultimate Championships—we understand what it means.

Armand “Mondo” Duplantis is the greatest pole vaulter in history. You could make the case that he’s the greatest field event specialist, too. It’s not even crazy to suggest he is the best athlete our sport (or any other, for that matter) has ever seen. Being Swedish, he’s got a knack for pop songwriting.

And he’s been tapped by World Athletics to create and perform an anthemic pop number to commemorate the first ever World Ultimate Championships. If that comes as a surprise to you, it’s because you’ve missed Mondo’s first two singles, 2025’s “Bop” and more recently “Feelin’ Myself.”

They’re both well-crafted, totally palatable pop songs that wouldn’t feel out of place on a tropical house Spotify playlist. Mondo very much looks the part of a European pop star, too, and when performing, carries himself with a calm charisma befitting an athlete of his stature. He does in fact appear to be feelin’ himself while he sings about feelin’ himself, grooving easily to the “Pumped Up Kicks”-indebted bassline—that’s not easy to pull off.

The bar is low as far as track stars wading into the musical realm, but even so, Mondo’s music is better than an athlete’s vanity project has any business being. It’s serviceable, down-the-middle, auto-tuned fun that wouldn’t have stood out as exceptional or below average while flipping through the radio in 2015. Is it Temu Justin Bieber? Perhaps. But you wouldn’t be appalled if it came up on shuffle. The world needs that kind of stuff—as a soundtrack for grocery shopping, for straight-to-Netflix romcom montages, and now, to hype up novel track and field event formats. Credit where credit is due.

In tasking one of its most recognizable stars with drumming up excitement for this year’s biggest track event, World Athletics execs are masterminding the sort of ~synergy~ every MBA student can only dream of. Surely Mondo’s day rate is less than somebody making similar music, like Kygo—the Norwegian producer whose 2025 collaboration with extremely Colorado-coded boy band OneRepublic featured Mondo in its music video. And surely the average track and field fan will be more excited by Mondo dropping a mid-career-Bieber-sounding song than Kygo or somebody Kygo-adjacent doing the same.

Vertical integration aside, is this good for the sport? That’s tougher to say.

We’re doubtful this will be what it takes for track to bumrush the mainstream. It’s equally unlikely that the World Ultimate Championship theme song is going to be Mondo’s big musical break. (He seems to enjoy making music that he enjoys listening to—that doesn’t mean it’s the genre of music that will appeal to larger audiences about a decade after its peak commercial viability.) Will track fans get a kick out of it? Sure! Will it get talked about for a few minutes on Sports Shouting? Possibly! Will any of that move the needle? Probably not.

What would, however, is this: a last-minute addition to the World Ultimate program, in the form of an athletes-only Eurovision-style song contest.

It would be structured as a sort of biathlon. Entrants would field their standard track and field event, then be forced to share an originally written pop song in front of a cheering, jeering crowd of crazed sports/pop music fans.

Mondo is already a lock as an entrant. We’ll see if Jakob Ingebrigtsen can get back into fighting shape/churn out another Norwegian-language pop banger. Noah Lyles and Sandi Morris could reunite for Team USA. Ideally there would be a handful of other athletes who hail from someplace other than Scandinavia. But the gist is that your placement in your athletic event and your placement in the song competition are averaged out, with a separate podium moment for the best hybrid athlete (sorry not sorry to Hyrox competitors – displaying range as a world class track and field athlete and hook-writer is what really makes you a hybrid star).

Look, we won’t pretend this is a super feasible or even a good idea… but it would be fun as hell. And there’s certainly precedent for weird, non-sporting events to wind up enmeshed in global athletic competitions. Just ask Charles Downing Lay, who took silver for Team USA at the 1936 Olympics in town planning for his design of what would go on to become Brooklyn’s Marine Park.

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