Armand Duplantis is known as Mondo. He is a vaulter and has cleared 19 feet at least twice this year. Most vaulters do not clear this height until they reach their prime compete level when they are in their mid-20s. Mondo is 17.

Mondo already has outgrown his home training facility in Louisiana. He jumps so high that the padding on a brick wall near the landing pit no longer provides him with a safety cushion should a practice vault move sideways. So, to continue his training, Mondo practices at his high school.

Mondo is committed to success, and he comes from good family stock. His father was an All-American vaulter who cleared 19 feet as a professional. His mother was a heptathlete and volleyball player. An older brother finished third at the Southeastern Conference indoor vaulting championships. Another brother played in the Little League World Series and now is a college outfielder.

Mondo has represented Sweden in several international competitions. Sweden is his mother’s home country and Mondo maintains dual citizenship. All the boys in the family have enjoyed summers in Sweden and they are comfortable with that country’s youth sports development programs.

Mondo began his training while still wearing diapers. He climbed a neighbor’s tree. Then, he used a skateboard to zoom off the roof with his brothers. His first vaults with a broomstick occurred in the living room. An ottoman served as his landing pit. When he was seven, he was a world age-group champion, preferring to jump barefoot until he was required to wear spiked shoes. Slightly more than a year ago, he vaulted 10 feet in the backyard by launching himself from a hoverboard.

Mondo hopes to vault 19 feet 81/4 inches this year. That is just six inches less than the world record. By the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, his aim is to be the best vaulter in the world and to compete for the gold medal.

For now, though, Mondo will stay close to home. He’s a good pole-vaulter, according to his father, but Mondo needs a little more formal and life education before he travels extensively around the world to compete in the vault.

But, the bar continues to rise for Mondo, who, in everyday life, does keep his feet planted firmly on the ground. That’s a good reminder for all of us as we strive to achieve new heights everyday in business.

A few weeks ago, we lost a sports broadcasting legend. Bob Wolff’s career spanned almost 80 years. He called Don Larsen’s perfect World Series game, the greatest football game ever played—the 1958 National Football League championship game—and the two titles for the New York Knicks.

Bob was cited by the Guinness World Records as having the longest career of any sports broadcaster. He started during 1939 while a student and former baseball player at Duke University. He continued until early this year with our News 12 Long Island. During this span of time, Bob preserved a large amount of tape—about 1,000 hours of video and audio recordings—that included interviews with Jim Thorpe, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Joe Louis. He donated the tapes to the Library of Congress.

Throughout Bob’s life both on and off the air, he touched and helped many people along the way. The tributes shared during his life and since his passing indicate that he always carried himself with class and honesty.

Bob once broadcast a professional basketball game when he was not even in the arena. Bad weather prevented him from flying to Cincinnati for a Knicks game that was to be telecast on Channel 9. So, he worked the game from a television monitor while sitting in the station’s studio on the 83rd floor in Manhattan. As he told the story years later, Bob said that he did not want to make a public confession that he was not at the game, but “journalistic honesty compelled me to make an acknowledgement that circumstances were different.” He told the television audience that while the game was coming from Cincinnati the audio was transmitted from the WOR-TV studios high up in the Empire State Building.

Striving for honesty and integrity is an important lesson that requires the full attention of today’s journalists and broadcasters. For those of us in business, we, too, regularly must remind ourselves about these attributes. Without honesty and integrity, who would want to work with and for any of us?