Even as the remarkable pole vaulter Armand Duplantis achieved another world record, clearing 6.30 metres, the man who dropped right behind him to fetch the silver is worth a close look for his inspirational journey from fighting depression to winning silver now at the World Championships in Japan. The Greek Emmanouil Karalis talked gracefully about his “friend” Duplantis and his plans to “beat him sometime”.
Karalis had cleared 6m and came mighty close to clear 6.15. He was over the bar, but as he came down, got the slightest of the touches and the bar toppled. “It was a fantastic show. I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did. It was a fantastic evening. I’m glad my friend broke the world record. I tried my best to beat my own personal best and become the second best of all time.
“I hope that I will beat him sometime. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I train and push myself. I hope so. But regardless, win or lose, we will gather all the guys. Drink a glass of wine and enjoy.”
Perhaps, it’s apt to rewind to 2022 to Munich just before the European Championships, when he suffered a panic attack.
A moment to remember ✨
Emmanouil Karalis soars to silver with 6.00m — his first-ever #WorldAthleticsChamps medal! 🥈🇬🇷 pic.twitter.com/WSfftvCBhE
— European Athletics (@EuroAthletics) September 15, 2025
“I was standing on the pole vault runway, at training, and that’s when I felt it. A panic attack. My first. It felt like my heart stopped, like I was about to die. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t run. There were tears, and thankfully I was wearing sunglasses so no one noticed.It was horrible,” he wrote on world athletics.org.
That year he had started well but had suffered an injury that kept him out of training for a month. That triggered the downward spiral. “ I couldn’t train for almost a month. That led me to a dark place spiritually, emotionally, because I couldn’t do what I love on a high level.” He wrote about how “negative media coverage” further fuelled it and it led to a “losing my confidence”. “At first I didn’t know I had depression. I wasn’t able to identify the feeling. I was trying to be strong, to pretend it wasn’t there.”
But his mother spotted that something was deeply wrong. “My mom knew it – she always knows when something is wrong – and I told her when I was competing: I do not love what I do now; I need a break. I didn’t qualify for the European final, and that actually made me happy. It was a weird feeling. Cathartic.”
He stopped watching athletics, training and rebelled against his coach. Instead, he went to Italy, alone for a vacation, “trying to feel like a normal person”. He switched off his phone and hit the mountains in Tuscany and “enjoyed the peace”.
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“I grew my beard, my hair, and when I came back home I looked, and felt, like a different person.” He started to consult a psychiatrist and began an honest talk with himself, and to the close ones around him. “It led me to understand that I am human, that it’s okay not to be okay, to cry, to have bad days.”
It wasn’t his first bout of depression. He had it earlier as a 15 year old but that was not because of a downward trend in his performance but due to racism.
Karalis is mixed-race; his mother is from Uganda and he obviously stood out from the rest. “I was only 15. We had a lot of racist coaches in the stadium. When I was young, and I started jumping higher than the rest of the kids, I started getting racist comments, looks, stares. These black guys cannot pole vault.Go back to your country with your mother. It almost destroyed me mentally. That continued until my 20s. For six years, I was dealing with it almost every day and, finally, I decided to talk about what was happening, to tell my federation about the things the coach was saying.” The case went huge in his country, it went to the Supreme Court, and others came out to talk about their experiences.
But the blinds were now coming back again, in a different form. When he returned from Italy, he changed his coach. Now his father, a former decathlete and not a pole vaulter, became his new coach. Meanwhile, Karalis worked on his mental health. “I started breathing exercises, thinking about positive things, and did other stuff that slowly made me more relaxed when I was going through the worst of it. There were other mechanisms, too: a lot of talking, a lot of sessions spent getting to the core of why it happened.” He had won the battle against racism – “I became someone who stood up to racism – and I won”, and waging an inspiring one against depression. His next aim is to take down Armando Duplantis one day.
