Molly Caudery has had a busy weekend when we meet earlier this month. She spent Sunday afternoon at the Emirates watching Arsenal take on Chelsea in the Premier League before heading to the world premiere of the new Peaky Blinders film in Birmingham on the Monday evening.
Her fiancé, who happens to be British Indoor high jump champion Joel Clarke-Khan, excitedly mentions that they were sitting next to Aston Villa players Jadon Sancho and Morgan Rogers at the screening.
Today is a return to normalcy, which in Caudery’s case involves hurling herself more than four metres into the air.
The pole vaulter is a fortnight out from the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Poland, which start today. The High Performance Athletics Centre at Loughborough University is a hub of activity. Five-time Paralympic medallist Jonnie Peacock is training just over from Caudery as she works with her coach Scott Simpson. Caudery calls him the “best in the world” and their easy collaboration is apparent as they converse in what may as well be a foreign language of pole heights, run-ups and grips throughout the session. “Let’s go, champ,” rings out Simpson’s voice as Caudery prepares herself for another vault.
The 26-year-old came to the sport after exhausting other options during her childhood in Cornwall.
“I tried absolutely everything,” she says. “I dedicated a huge part of my life to gymnastics from the age of four until 11. I did loads of swimming, I did surf lifesaving, I tried cross country, and in athletics I tried all the events. I fell in love with pole vault.”
Her dad Stuart introduced her to the discipline as “not the best decathlete” himself and became her first coach. Her first personal best was 1.8m. It is now 4.92m, a British record.
“When you catch a good ride, I can’t even explain to you how it feels,” the Red Bull athlete says, sounding very much like the Cornish surfer she could have been in another life.
“There’s so much energy. You put all of this speed into a big bend, get upside down and then you fly.
“There have been periods of time where I’ve not had that [feeling] and pole vault is not fun. Then you do one and you’re like, ‘That’s why I do it.’ It’s a split second of feeling completely free and happy.”
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‘We compete in briefs and a crop top. It’s what we wear. People have an issue with that’
‘We compete in briefs and a crop top. It’s what we wear. People have an issue with that’
World Indoors was Caudery’s breakout competition. When she won gold in Glasgow in 2024, she became the first British World Champion in the event. Suddenly she was a star.
“I broke through quickly and gained a lot of followers,” she says. “Social media has been a huge journey for me. To start with, I would post without thinking. Then one day I saw photos of myself in a news article. They were photos that I had posted, but I didn’t expect them to get seen by the world. I realised I needed to be really careful.”
“The athlete regularly shares bikini pics with followers online” was one caption in a news article about Caudery that came out after her win.
“We always compete in briefs and a crop top. It’s what we wear. That makes me feel ready. But lots of people also have an issue with that. There’s loads of comments like, ‘Why are you wearing that?’ For the most part I ignore it. It’s not particularly nice to read it but 99% of the time, I don’t let it affect me.”
There was a lot of excitement about Caudery’s prospects ahead of the Olympics that year. In Paris, she came in at a later opening height than the rest of the field, but failed to clear it, meaning she did not even make the final. She made a tearful apology to the British public on the BBC.
Caudery says that despite the frustrations of her Olympic performance, she found her experience in Tokyo a year later at the World Athletics Championships much harder to deal with. A freak accident during the warm-up led to Caudery being wheeled off the track and out of the competition.
“I was scared of pole vault,” she explains.
“I had got injured pole vaulting and that created a real fear around it. I’d not been through that before. Normally I love pole vault, and I’m back to that place now but it did take a little while and some really close work with my coach to rebuild that.”
That was a different mental challenge to the one she had processing the Olympics.
“I have come to peace with it, even though it was obviously really tough at the time,” she says.
“If I look back on it, I still get quite upset sometimes. I think that’s OK. It took me a really long time to learn from it.
“I think I missed one technical cue and I was slowing into the take-off so the poles weren’t moving through. That is what I put it down to. But why that happened? I still get confused about that. I was in the best shape of my life. I was in a great place mentally.
“When it first happened, people tried to ask me questions on it, and I didn’t want to think about it. But now I can talk about it. It’s not particularly nice, but it’s fine. You have to park it and move on. If I was to dwell on it, I would be carrying that negativity with me, and that is just going to make me worse in future competition.
“I have had my moments where I let myself feel that grief. It sounds silly, but it is like any other grieving process. I let myself feel it and move on.”
Caudery has been working her way back to her best this year, taking victory at the British Indoors with a jump of 4.65m. The weekend after we speak, she wins in Rouen on the Indoor Tour with a jump of 4.7m. When she competes on it will be her opportunity to reset from the past two years and she is already laser-focused on her goal: Los Angeles 2028.
Photography by Mark Roe/Red Bull Content Pool