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.”
It also takes her some time to list her broken bones down the years, including a broken wrist from going down a firefighter’s pole, multiple broken fingers, a broken foot and a broken nose – twice.
“The first time I broke my nose I was doing a gainer – a backflip going forward – and I kneed myself in the nose,” she says laughing. “The other time I was on a trampoline doing backflips and, as I came up, I landed on one of the sticks and it just went straight in.”
Caudery also admits to “losing everything, all the time”, including iPads on flights and her wallet. “My partner’s exactly the same as well,” she adds. “It’s just part of life now. I never take anything too seriously. As long as it’s nothing absolutely out of this world, you can always come back from little mishaps and I just don’t let it affect me.”
And that, it turns out, is her unlikely superpower. Caudery is so used to chaos that when she faced the most severe pressure at the world indoor championships in Glasgow this month, including breaking down in tears after seeing the French athlete Margot Chevrier’s foot pointing “in the wrong direction” after an injury in the final, she was able to hold it together.
“For the two days beforehand I could barely sleep because I was just so nervous, just almost like tingling, nonstop,” she says as she reflects on beating the Olympic champion, the American Katie Moon, and her other big rivals with a 4.80m clearance. “My coach, Scott Simpson, said that it was the most chaotic competition he’s ever witnessed. There were technical issues and lots of injuries. But I’m quite a chaotic person. They say fight fire with fire and I met chaos with chaos.”
Twelve months ago Caudery was largely unknown because she was always on the treatment table. But a sustained period of being injury-free, for the first time since 2017, has been a gamechanger. Finishing fifth at last year’s outdoor world championships in Budapest laid down a marker. Clearing a world‑leading 4.86m before taking gold in Glasgow confirmed she was world class.
But even the buildup to her world indoors didn’t go entirely without incident. “Tuesday morning, I’m driving to the track. I’ve got a BBC interview, and I’ve tied my poles on to the car, when the garage door comes off,” she says. “Then the roof rack comes off my car with the poles on, so the poles are hanging over the front of my car. I call Scott and I’m like: ‘My roof rack’s come off, my poles are off,’ and he’s like: ‘OK, I’ll come and get you.’”
Incredibly, there was to be a further mishap shortly afterwards. “I think bad things come in threes and later that day I spilled scalding tea all over my lap and I thought it was going to bubble on my legs but I was OK in the end,” she says.
You worry on Caudery’s behalf when she confesses to being a little bit shortsighted – and says she doesn’t wear contact lenses as they irritate her eyes. However, she insists she is being more sensible in the buildup to Paris. Adrenaline sports, for one, are off the table – and she has also spoken to Simpson about the need to be a little more careful.
“Growing up I used to do a lot of skiing, surfing and cliff jumping,” she says. “We used to climb across the cliffs and then jump in. But after I did my finger, Scott sat me down in the nicest way possible and he just said: ‘You need to try and be better.’
“He meant it as in: ‘Just try and contain yourself a little bit. Don’t trip over your own feet and this, that and the other.’ I do wrap myself in cotton wool a little bit. But I won’t stop myself from living completely.”
Meanwhile Caudery attributes some of her talent to being a serious gymnast, training 24 hours a week from the age of four to 11 – although even that had its crazy moments. “As a 10-year-old I would miss a Tuesday of school to do eight hours of training which, when I look back on that, is just insane,” she says. “There’s no way I could do that now. We were doing three sets of 30 chin-ups. I was very small but that is just ludicrous. But I do think that kind of set my base for where I am now.”
And while she liked her old gymnastics coach, she acknowledges that there is “definitely a different culture” in the sport compared to track and field. “I remember one time we cheated on one of our conditioning sessions, and he said he had CCTV and was watching us,” she says. “We did four minutes instead of five minutes of sprinting on a squishy mat and he came back in and said: ‘Right, you are all doing this conditioning for the whole session.’ So, four hours of leg conditioning, all of us were crying, and he was like: ‘You cannot stop.’
“I remember my grandma picking me up and I was like: ‘I don’t want to do it any more.’ But never again did we cheat a warm-up. It worked. Not that I’m condoning it, but it was character building.”
This week Caudery will head to New Zealand for two months to rejoin the highly regarded Simpson, who has taken up a coaching position after leaving UK Athletics last year. There she will train with Eliza McCartney, the local hero whom she beat into silver in Glasgow.
“It does mean I’m going to be going to the other side of the world in an Olympic year, but I think it’s quite exciting,” she says. “It is a big change but New Zealand Athletics have already set me up with accommodation and everything. I spoke to their manager and she just said: ‘Why wouldn’t we want another athlete to come in and push our athletes?’”
While there Caudery will continue to document her adventures on her Instagram account, which has nearly 250,000 followers, as she heads towards what she hopes will be gold in Paris. “After last summer’s worlds in Budapest, I definitely felt impostor syndrome,” she says. “Everything came to me so fast. But now I’m a gold medallist. And when I’m backing it up and consistently jumping 4.80m bars, which is world class, I am starting to believe that I’m in the right place.”
