Until the moment Molly Caudery charges down the runway at the Paris Olympics, before bending, twisting and flipping her body over a bar above the height of a doubledecker bus, she will be wrapping herself in cotton wool. With good reason, as it turns out. For while the 24-year-old has a favourite’s chance of pole vault gold this summer – and the X factor to gatecrash the mainstream – she also has an innate klutziness that could scupper everything.
“It’s just little things that happen in my daily life, like chopping my finger off,” she says, referring to a freak weightlifting accident in 2021 that required three surgeries to repair after 90% of a finger came off. “There’s a natural chaos that my coach has had to learn to deal with, because it’s just a part of me.”
