Manolo flies, Manolo soars

When Manolis – as he is known to all – vaults, it’s more like an art installation than a sporting competition—the spectator is swept away by this synthesis of innovative performance and physical transcendence in which movement becomes art and gravity seems willing to negotiate. His body does not obey the laws of physics. It doesn’t fall like a 75 kg body should after a five-and-a-half or six-meter vault. No, something holds him up there, on the cusp between the tangible and the void, between ground and sky, as though he can subtly distend time in a way only very great athletes know how to.

Manolo is one of those athletes, and with proof: on Saturday, March 22, he cleared 6.05 meters to again smash the Greek national record and add another medal to his collection, namely, the second place and the silver at the World Indoor Championship in China.

The 2024 Olympic medal, a new national record and the moment he cleared six meters. In 2025 he does one better: 6.05 meters and the silver medal at the World Indoor Championship

A year ago

It’s August 2024, the Paris Olympic Stadium is humming with the sound of tens of thousands of spectators, and the floodlights are refracting through the droplets of sweat on the athletes’ bodies, creating a strange, almost mythological atmosphere. Karalis is standing dead still at the start of the runway. It’s that split second before the sprint, when the future’s still unwritten and there’s still a chance the impossible could happen. The athlete takes a deep breath. And he’s off. The pole – an object with a personality of its own, something between an extension of his body and an unpredictable weapon—bends sharply then snaps back into shape, catapulting him to heights normally reserved for birds or careless drones. 5.90 meters. The bar remains in place. For a second, no one is sure it actually happened. A silence seems to suck all the sound out of the stadium.

And, then, the explosion.

The ceremony is like something between a knighting and a mystic initiation. Sergey Bubka, a man who could easily be called a demigod of the pole vault, a man who conquered the air, hangs the bronze medal round Karalis’ neck. Then the selfie with Mondo Duplantis and Sam Kendricks—a photograph that’s both a historical document and a viral post. In that frame, the past present and future of sport coexist. Karalis is now part of the elite.

A laurel-wreathed youth of our own era

His and Olympiacos’ paths crossed in 2021, a few months after he took fourth place at the Tokyo Olympics. Karalis had already enjoyed some important athletic successes, but the biggest in his career were still ahead of him. That alone may have sufficed for him to don the emblem of the Olympic champion, but there was more to it than that. Because, above all else, Manolis Karalis is also a perfect match for the Club’s ethos, personality-wise. His values resonate with those of Olympiacos, as they emerged a century ago and continue to permeate the organization to this day. It is as an Olympiacos athlete that he has achieved the most important successes of his career to date, the crowning moment of which was the Olympic medal in Paris. On the podium, he was transformed into an updated and more extroverted version of the Olympiacos emblem: an Olympic champion, and a youth that had earned his laurels.

But who is Manolis Karalis?

He was born in October 1999 and seemed from the very start to have been suspended between two worlds. His father, a Greek decathlete, passed on a natural inclination for sports. His Ugandan mother gave him the resilience and the smile that often turns the greatest challenges into a game.

Growing up in Patras, young “Manolo” quickly learned what it means to be different. The stares, the comments and whispers, everything that follows a child who, for whatever reason, is not an easy fit for the usual, predefined categories. And that may be why, when he made his first vault at the age of 12, he saw the pole not as a piece of sports equipment, but as a means of escape. A tool he could wield not to move his body a few meters further along, but to launch it higher than anyone could expect.

At 16, he breaks the U18 world record.

At 18, he becomes the U20 world record holder.

At 22, he breaks the Greek record for men.

The numbers tell a story. But sport is more than numbers. In 2019, Karalis is forced to fight a very different battle. It’s not about feet or meters this time, but about the limitations some people would like to impose on others.

A Federation coach—a man who should support athletes—refuses to call him by his name. For him, Manolis is just “the black”. But it doesn’t stop there. He says “black people aren’t right for pole vaulting.”

It’s not hard to imagine how easy it would have been for Manolo to simply stay silent. To suck it up and let it go. After all, many do just that. But Manolis did not stay silent. He publicly denounced the incident and its perpetrator, and demanded justice. Not for himself, but for all those who would follow him.

When he finally cleared 6 meters, he posted this on social media: “I was told that black people weren’t right for pole vaulting. Well, I’m the first black man to break 6 meters”.

If pole vaulting is a sport in which athletes learn to subvert gravity, Karalis has shown that he can also subvert prejudice.

Being a child prodigy can be a scary thing. So many expectations. So much pressure. Having to prove over and over you deserve to be where you are. At some point, all this became a burden. The anxiety, the panic attacks, the bouts of depression: success can sometimes come at a very high price. Karalis lost sight of himself. Luckily, he was able to find his way back. He learned to see the pole vault not as an obligation, but as a joy. And he started to compete because he wanted to, not because he felt he had to.

2024 wasn’t just a good year for Manolis Karalis. It was the year that made him into a legend. Bronze at the World Indoor Athletics Championships in Glasgow. Silver at the European Championships in Rome. Bronze at the Paris Olympics. And then…At the Diamond League meet in Poland. The bar is raised to 6.00 meters. For an athlete, the 6-meter barrier is a lot more than just a number. It’s the gateway to the next level. Karalis takes off. And he clears the bar. He’s the first Greek to ever vault so high, and he repeats the feat a few months later at the Greek championships.

More than just an athlete 

Emmanouil Karalis seems to move through the world with a natural, unforced ease, the kind that’s rooted not in some carefully constructed personal brand, but in a deeply rooted sense of who he is. That is truly rare in our era of overexposure and calculated self-imagery. His physical presence—linear, dynamic, with an almost childlike lightness—is reflected in the way he chooses to present himself: his hair in braids (a statement of identity, not just a stylistic decision); clothes that are quiet and expressive, not loud and brash; the natural flow of his words as he speaks, which are rhythmic but not pretentious.

Because Karalis is not just a pole vaulter, he is living proof that athletes can sometimes touch the sky. And every time he launches himself skywards, if only for the briefest instant, gravity cedes an iota of its absolute hold over man and