by “They say to fight fire… I fight chaos,” says Molly Caudery, laughing about those crucial, carefully planned days, which went to Britain’s first world pole vault champion earlier the this month.
“Tuesday morning, I’m driving to the track – I’ve got an interview with the BBC, and I’ve got my poles on the car when the garage door falls off,” she says. “Then the roof rack comes out of my car with the poles on it. So the poles are hanging over the front of my car.
“I call Scott [Simpson, her coach] and me: ‘My roof rack is gone, my poles are off’. It’s like: ‘Okay, I’ll come and get you’.
“Later that day I spilled scalding tea all over my knee. My partner is exactly the same too. We lose everything. You can always come back from small disasters. It’s the little things that happen in my everyday life… like cutting off my finger.”
That’s a reference to how her finger was only saved after an emergency specialist operation that required a Christmas Eve trip from Cornwall to Derby in 2021 after she somehow caught her hand between a weight rack and the bar. And then there are the childhood stories of a broken foot and fingers, as well as breaking her nose twice while trampolining. Mr. Bump clearly has nothing on her.
And yet listening to Caudery is a great reaction to the precise marginal gains we are so often sold in elite sport, even if Simpson’s finger incident spurred action. “He sat me down in the nicest way and said: ‘You have to try to be better’,” says Caudery. “It was, like, ‘Try and hold back a bit. Don’t trip over your own feet.’
“Scott had to learn to deal with the natural chaos because it’s just a part of me. I think it’s quite difficult to manage but now he accepts it and we move on. I wrap myself in a bit of cotton wool and joke about it but it’s a very serious thing. As I get older, maybe I’ll grow out of it.”
That ‘cotton wool’ must now be applied in Auckland, with Caudery taking the unusual step in the next six weeks of relocating to New Zealand where Simpson, once based in Loughborough, is now national coach.
Simpson is also coaching Eliza McCartney, who finished second to Caudery at the World Indoor Championships, and her departure is a big blow for British Athletics.
“It was a very natural change but it means I’m going to the other side of the world in an Olympic year,” says Caudery. “I can’t be away from Scott because he’s an incredible coach. Athletics New Zealand have been so accepting of me joining them. I spoke to the head coach and she said: ‘Why don’t we want another athlete to come in and push our athletes?’ They welcome me with open arms.”
Jack Buckner, the chief executive of UK Athletics, is clearly still hoping to lure Simpson back into a British system that has thrived on precious little outdoor events in recent years. “I’m not panicking… sometimes you have to gently let people go through the thought process they’re going through,” Buckner said. “He knows he can come and talk to me anytime – he knows I’ve got his back.”
Now 24, Caudery always assumed the 2028 Los Angeles Games represented her best chance to end Britain’s 40-year wait for a women’s Olympic field event champion.
That forecast had to be quickly revised after a stellar winter which, along with her gold medal in Glasgow, included a world-leading 4.86m clearance in Rouen. As well as the Olympic Games in Paris, she will also go to the European Championships in Rome in June. “It feels a bit like a dream,” she says of a month that has suddenly seen her go from being mostly known only in athletic circles to prime time in the BBC studio with her hero Dame Jessica Ennis- Hill. Caudery’s Instagram followers now stand at nearly 250,000.
“There was maybe, like, one percent of me who thought I could get a medal or the gold,” she says. “I keep talking to my family and I’m like: ‘Oh, I won a gold medal at the World Championships’. When I say it out loud, it sounds crazy.
“For the two days before the competition I could hardly sleep because I was so nervous, almost like a constant tingling. Every competition I’m starting to believe a little more. I definitely felt what people call impostor syndrome after life last year.
“Really the spotlight is not where my nerves are. They are just on the runway. My first attempt, I felt like I was made of jelly.”
Having secured her first sponsorship deal from Adidas earlier this year, she is undeterred by her success following a journey that began at Carn Brea Leisure Center in Redruth, which has the only athletics facility in the county. her native Cornwall.
She was initially coached by her father Stuart, an athlete who competed at club level in everything from cross country, sprint hurdles and sprint hurdles to the high jump, long jump and pole vault. Another vital foundation was provided by a no-nonsense gymnastics club for four- to 11-year-olds. Both broken nose incidents occurred while attempting back flips on a trampoline. The first was by kneeing herself in the face and the second by landing on one of the surrounding poles which, in her own words of truth, was “straight in”. Memories of gymnastics still make her smile. “At one point I was training 24 hours a week. As a 10-year-old I would miss Tuesday school to train eight hours.
“When I look back on that, it’s just crazy. But I think that kind of laid the groundwork for where I am now. As a 10 year old, we were doing like three sets of 30 chin-ups.
“I had a really nice coach – he was great… there’s definitely a different culture in gymnastics. I remember one time we cheated on one of our conditioning sessions, and he said he had CCTV and was watching us. We did four minutes instead of five minutes sprinting on a squishy mat and he came back in and said: ‘Right, you’re doing this conditioning for the whole session.’
“So, four hours of leg conditioning. We were all crying, and it was like: ‘You can’t stop.’ I remember my grandmother picking me up and I was: ‘I don’t want to do it anymore.’ But, we did not attract hot up ever again! It worked.
“A bit of tough love I guess… not that I’m condoning it but it was character building. Growing up, I did a lot of skiing and surfing and cliff jumping. I love to compete. It’s so much fun. I never take anything too seriously. I’m just living my dream.”
