Molly Caudery's quantum leap
Molly Caudery is a self-confessed adrenaline junkie. It’s perhaps no surprise to hear that from someone whose day job involves sprinting at full tilt before launching herself upside down almost five metres into the air. The risk is part of the attraction of her chosen sport – the Cornwall native is a keen surfer too – and she has fallen foul of misfortune on more than one occasion since she first picked up a pole around the age of 11 or 12.
Yet, in recent months, everything has been looking up. When Caudery speaks of having made “a pretty big jump”, she is speaking both literally and metaphorically.
At the beginning of 2023, her personal best for the pole vault stood at 4.60m. To put that in context, the height at which Katie Moon of the USA and Australia’s Nina Kennedy agreed to share World Championships gold last year was 4.90m.
In other words, the Briton who has a Commonwealth silver medal to her name was heading in the right direction but not yet in the same realm as compatriot, Olympic medal winner and national record-holder Holly Bradshaw.
And yet, in that Budapest competition, Caudery DID move up a level. She had booked her ticket to Hungary by winning the British title in a then huge PB of 4.71m before a clearance of 4.75m saw her finish fifth among the world’s best. An important momentum was gathering.
If last summer represented a step forward then 2024, so far at least, really has been a quantum leap. In January, the 23-year-old’s first competition of the year saw her soar to a world-leading 4.83m before she then strengthened that position in winning the UK Indoor Championships in 4.85m. In her final competition ahead of the World Indoor Championships, she went further clear of the rest of the world with a vault of 4.86m in France during a competition in which she attempted to overtake Bradshaw’s national mark of 4.90m.
All of this means she arrives in Glasgow no longer as a medal hopeful, but as the in-form competitor. There has been a lot to take in and some adjustments to be made for an athlete whose Olympic ambitions were focused more on LA 2028 rather than Paris 2024.
“It’s all happened very quickly for me,” says Caudery. “I think every athlete has their timeline and mine has been ‘2028's going to be my time’. But, by opening up the way that I have, I've got to adjust and I know that what I've jumped so far could be pushing towards those medal areas. I do think I need to re-evaluate. It’s crazy to think that that could put me up there.”
For someone who has been through her fair share of injury problems – Caudery almost chopped a finger off due to an accident in the gym on Christmas Eve of 2021, while last spring she underwent the second of two Achilles operations in the space of six months – she is not getting ahead of herself.
An uninterrupted winter, however, has clearly worked wonders. She is also aided by the support from back home. Cornwall is her “happy place”. The place to which she returns from her Loughborough base if things are getting too much. It’s also the place where a lasting love of athletics was kindled – and supported by her family.
Caudery, in fact, credits the logistical barriers she had to overcome due to living in that corner of Great Britain as “toughening her up” for a life in sport.
“Growing up in Cornwall made me who I am,” she says. “It makes you a little bit tougher, I guess, as there wasn't much in the way of facilities, but I still had the support I needed.
“We’d train outside all winter and if we did want to go indoors, we'd drive three or four hours to Bath [the closest indoor centre].
“Before the Commonwealth Games in 2018, I was still training down in Cornwall. It was in March, but it was snowing and we were just jumping outside. If it was windy, we'd just have to get on with it. If it was raining, we didn't have indoors to go into.
“Although it is nice to have those luxuries, I think it's really adapted me to those conditions, so when it does come to a competition, when things aren't perfect, I'm quite good at dealing with that.”
There will be no such worries about the conditions when it comes to competing under the Emirates Arena roof in Glasgow and the sell-out crowd will now be watching with interest to see if Caudery can continue the upward trajectory.
“Coming into the season, it wasn't [a target to win a world indoor medal]. It was just to go to the world indoors and make something good of myself and just do myself proud. But now I think if I can just keep doing what I'm doing then, yeah, a medal could definitely be on the cards and that's really exciting.”
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