TOKYO — Mondo Duplantis was a high school freshman when his life changed.
A pole-vaulting prodigy from Lafayette, La., Duplantis was a couple of months from his first international competition, the 2015 world youth championships, when he received a recruiting call from a coach. The twist was that the coach was from the Swedish Athletics Association.
“He would call me and my parents every day going, ‘You should compete for Sweden, we’re super well-organized, we’re going to take care of your poles, we’re going to do everything for you,’ ” Duplantis recently recalled. “It sounded like a pretty good offer.