Molly Caudery is Great Britain’s first world or Olympic pole vault champion. She now has her sights set on becoming the first British woman to win an Olympic field event title in 40 years and she comes from a county with just one athletics track and no indoor athletics facility.
Not that Caudery, whose Instagram following passed 215,000 after her dramatic indoor gold in Glasgow on Saturday, sees being from Cornwall, an area most associated with surfing, as a disadvantage in a sport historically dominated by the United States and the old Soviet Union. Union.
“Growing up in Cornwall made me who I am; it makes you a little bit tougher,” she says. “There weren’t many facilities, but I still got the support I needed. We trained outside all winter. If we wanted to go in, we drove three to four hours by car to Bath.
“There aren’t many people who come from Cornwall in high-end athletics, so when someone does that you have the whole county behind you. The support from Cornwall is second to none.
“I have a vivid memory of the Commonwealth Games in 2018… I’m still training in Cornwall and funnily enough it was in March but it was snowing and we were just outside jumping in the snow. We just had to keep going – in the rain and the wind. While it’s nice to have the luxury, it really adapted me to those circumstances, so when it comes to a competition and things aren’t perfect, I can handle that quite well.”
Saturday’s final in Glasgow, where Caudery’s winning distance of 4.80 meters came shortly after seeing another competitor, France’s Margot Chevrier, suffer a horrific ankle fracture, was certainly a test of both mental and physical determination.
The other jumpers had to wait 15 minutes while Chevrier received emergency medical treatment at the exact spot where they would next take off. “I ended up crying to my coach,” Caudery said. “I really take on other people’s emotions. I tried to take myself away and I just couldn’t. My coach Scott [Simpson] knows me very well. He said, ‘Don’t hold it in, let it all out,’ so I had a minute to cry, reset and I’m sending my love to them all.
“I then had to regroup and execute. I am very proud of myself. I’m definitely not someone who goes above and beyond anyone. You’re against yourself: jump as high as you can. Especially at field events, everyone is friends and wants to see the others do well.”
Caudery also has firsthand experience dealing with a career-threatening injury. She was in the middle of a gym session in Cornwall in December 2021 when an index finger became trapped between the bar and the barbell rack at the end of a lift. Her finger was 90 percent swollen, forcing her parents to make a five-hour trip to Derby on Christmas Eve for emergency treatment by a hand specialist. Caudery would later post on Instagram the x-ray of the bone between the two middle joints, literally broken completely in half. That would require three operations, but she still returned to take silver at the Commonwealth Games in 2022. She then required two more surgeries on her Achilles tendon, but during those long rehabilitation periods she learned that it was possible, especially in an event like pole vaulting with so many events, to still improve while injured.
“I was still pole vaulting in my head and imagining competing when I was going through rehab,” she says. “I was visualizing non-stop and that was all I could see. When I started jumping again, some of the things I needed to work on almost disappeared because I had visualized the perfect jump so many times. It had a huge impact.”
A fifth-place finish on Caudery’s return to major competition at last year’s World Championships underlined her potential and having finally stayed injury-free all winter, the benefits of consistent training are finally being felt.
“I’ve been really unlucky with injuries and for the first time since I was maybe 17 years old, I’m injury-free,” she says. “Mentally I am stronger, physically I am stronger. The combination of all that has taken me higher.”
Caudery lived in Cornwall until she was 18, where she was trained by her father Stuart at the Redruth track near her home village of Illogan. She had been a gymnast until the age of eleven, but switched to multi-event athletics, also excelling in hurdles and high jump, and concentrating on the pole vault from the age of fifteen.
She went to university in Miami at the age of 18 before returning to Britain and Loughborough, where she wrote a dissertation on resilience and mental health. Her current training group in Loughborough also includes Holly Bradshaw, world, European and Olympic bronze medalist, as well as New Zealander Eliza McCartney, who took silver on Saturday. Caudery’s victory in Glasgow followed leading distances peaking at 4.86 meters (just 4cm above the British record) already this season at events in Birmingham and France.
After such an emotional race on Saturday – which was also briefly interrupted to watch Josh Kerr’s 3,000m victory – there were more tears in victory as Caudery looked for her boyfriend, high jumper Joel Clarke-Khan , and her parents Stuart and Barbara, who had made the nine-hour car journey from Cornwall to the circuit. “It was an indescribable feeling,” she says. “Especially in front of your own audience, knowing that you have the whole country behind you, knowing that you share that with them, and they are just as proud as you are. You have a split second to fall [after a clearance] and realize what you’ve done, and then you can absorb it.
A holiday is now looming, with Caudery, a self-confessed ‘adrenaline junkie’, admitting she will have to consciously limit some of her passions in the five months until the Olympics. That includes skydiving – “I’ll take it up again when I’m done with my career” – but not those visits to Illogan and the nearby beaches of Portreath, Gwithian and Perranporth.
“If I’ve ever felt a little overwhelmed, or anything like that, I have a great relationship with my coach Scott, and he’ll just say, ‘Okay, go to Cornwall for the weekend,’ and every time I come back he says, ‘You just look fresh and energetic,’” says Caudery. “I just love it there. It’s a great place to call home and visit. It’s my happy place. I am a very outdoor person and I love being in the sea and the open air and surfing.
“We do pole vaulting for the adrenaline and the rush we get. It’s what I thrive on. Although it can be a little scary at times, I think that’s what makes it so exciting. I think 2028 in LA will be really great, but the way I did it [in 2024]I can’t deny that there is a chance for the Olympics. I think I need to reevaluate. It’s crazy. It is every athlete’s dream to win an Olympic medal. If one day I could achieve that Olympic gold, the whole dream would come true.”