Two of the greatest students of their respective events have once again reached new heights in their post-championships return to the Diamond League circuit. Pole vault phenom Mondo Duplantis and middle-distance maestro Jakob Ingebrigtsen battled for top billing at last weekend’s Kamila Skolimowska Memorial meet in Silesia, Poland, both setting world records with a commanding win in their respective events. Their battle was also financial: Silesia offered a $10,000 bonus for the performance of the meet that scored highest on the World Athletics tables, and Duplantis’s 6.26m vault, worth 1,339 points, beat out Ingebrigtsen’s 1,320 from his 7:17.55 run in the 3000m.

While a world record is, by definition, an unprecedented achievement, there’s a bit of a sense of deja vu. It’s the first time both men have broken a world record at the same meet, but it’s both athletes’ third time breaking a record at a Diamond League meet since the start of 2023. Duplantis has now literally raised the bar on the pole vault, one centimeter at a time, on ten different occasions. And as Ingebrigtsen himself noted, the Norwegian now has three of the ten distance marks with his 2000m, 3000m, and 2 mile performances (presumably the remaining distances Jakob is targeting are 1500m, 1 mile, steeplechase, 5000m, 10,000m, half marathon, and marathon).

While Ingebrigtsen has yet to take down a record in an Olympic distance, the famed 7:20.67 3000m posted by Daniel Komen in 1996 was generally considered one of the hardest middle-distance records to break. Komen’s mark survived attacks by Hicham El Guerrouj, Haile Gebrselassie, and Kenenisa Bekele, all in their primes, before Jakob Ingebrigtsen got his hands on it – and knocked over three seconds off with his transcendent run in Poland. Duplantis, on the other hand, had barely cleaned the chalk off his palms from his last record-setting leap – his 6.25m in Paris lasted exactly 20 days before being overtaken.

Each record is historic and significant – as are the generational talents that produced them – but the performances came at two different points in each athlete’s narrative. At only 24 years old, Duplantis is rapidly running out of things to accomplish in the sport: he’s the indoor and outdoor world record holder, the 2x Olympic, World, and World Indoor champion, 3x Diamond League champ, and the meet record holder at 12 of the 15 meets currently on the DL circuit. The all-time top 10 list in the men’s pole vault now only has one name on it. So what’s the point of continuing on?

Presumably, there is some intrinsic value motivating the greatest vaulter to ever live to push himself higher. And, while we don’t know the exact structure of Mondo’s endorsement deals, there is undoubtedly great financial incentive from sponsors, meet promoters, and (inter)national federations to keep breaking the world record in perpetuity, one centimeter at a time. And while losses are becoming exceedingly rare for Duplantis, he’s not truly unbeatable: he’s riding an 18-win streak currently, but as recently as July of last year he took fourth on a rare off day in Monaco. What’s currently impossible, however, is for Mondo to have a good performance and lose: much like Team USA in Olympic basketball; it’s not a question of whether Mondo will get beat; it’s whether or not he will give a win away.

Ingebrigtsen, on the other hand, always seems locked into a battle against expectations, critics, and his own high standards. He’s become something of an Ahab-esque figure in pursuit of his white whale – a second global 1500m title following his Olympic gold in 2021. It’s a little funny how it almost doesn’t seem to matter to Jakob that he’s now the 3x reigning World/Olympic champion in the 5000m, a run of accomplishments that would be career-defining for some. But for Ingebrigtsen, he can’t even fully beat back the criticism that he only runs well in rabbited races. Unlike Mondo, Ingebrigtsen has plenty left to prove, and all indications suggest he’ll keep trying to run the legs off his competition in championship 1500s until he gets another gold or they stop holding championships altogether.