So it's 2 AM-ish and I'm reading about pole vault, which is not something I do, and I find out the greatest pole vaulter in history has started writing songs about being the greatest pole vaulter in history. The Athletic has the whole story and I haven't been able to put it down since.

Mondo Duplantis, the Swedish-American vaulter who has broken the world record so many times the record book basically has his handwriting in it, has released music. Actual music. Songs about winning gold, about the strange floating life of a man whose entire profession is launching himself five-plus metres into the air on a bendy stick and then coming back down as a national hero.

It makes no sense. It also makes complete sense, and that second part is the one keeping me up.

Think about what the man does. A pole vault lasts maybe six seconds from run-up to landing. Six seconds of absolute commitment after years of training, and then it's over, and everyone claps, and he does it again. There's no half-vaulting. The whole event is a series of tiny perfect explosions separated by long silences, and if that isn't song structure, verse and chorus and the space between, I don't know what is.

Duplantis has cleared heights nobody in the history of the species has cleared. He doesn't chase other people anymore; he chases himself, which is a psychological arrangement I find quietly disturbing when I think about it too long. Every record he breaks is his own. Imagine being the only measuring stick available. Somewhere in there, apparently, a man starts writing songs.

And the songs, from what The Athletic describes, aren't ironic little side projects. He's serious about it. Writing about the gold, the winning, what it feels like to be at the top of a sport where the top keeps moving because he's the one moving it.

What I can't shake is the loneliness embedded in this. Most athletes who make music are processing something, a comeback, a loss, a doubt. Duplantis is processing dominance. There's no rival left to write about. No villain. Just the bar, going up, again, at his own request. A song about that is basically a song about arguing with a version of yourself that keeps winning anyway.

Is the music good? Wrong question. I've written before that the questions are always more interesting than the answers, and the question here is why the most dominant athlete alive feels the need to explain himself in a second medium at all. What does a man with nothing left to prove say into a microphone?

Apparently he says something. And I'm going to go listen to it, tabs already open, lights still on.