What makes Mondo fly?

This was one of those delightfully rare stories where the idea came together almost immediately: reporter Bonnie Berkowitz was walking me through the magic of pole vaulting prodigy Mondo Duplantis’ vault, using a video to scrub back and forth while describing the process.

“That’s it!” I said. [N.B. — I didn’t literally say that… but close enough.] “We’ll tell the story exactly like that, and the whole thing will be a video!”

Scrollytelling is a fun design technique, but it can easily become a drag. It extends the scroll height of the page, and can artifically draw out content or animations in a way that feels tedious.

Here, however, it allowed readers to see every detail of how Mondo moves in slow motion, and easily scrub forward/backward in the video simply by scrolling a little bit.

This story created a model format for sports stories at The Post, where the highly visual video-as-scrolling-story format has been used several more times to showcase various sports and athletes.