Molly Caudery: How Cornwall helped build a pole vault world champion

Molly Caudery is 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 for 40 years and she hails from a county with just one track and no indoor athletics facility.

Not that Caudery, whose Instagram following has swollen beyond 215,000 after her dramatic world indoor gold in Glasgow on Saturday, regards coming from Cornwall, an area most associated with surfing, as any disadvantage in a sport historically dominated by the United States and the old Soviet Union.

“Growing up in Cornwall made me who I am - it makes you a little bit tougher,” she says. “There wasn’t much in the way of facilities, but I still had the support I needed. We trained outside all winter. If we did want to go indoors, we’d drive three or four hours in the car to Bath.

“There’s not loads of people that have come out of Cornwall in high end athletics so, when someone does, you have the whole county behind you. The Cornish support is unmatched.

“I have a vivid memory before the Commonwealth Games in 2018… still training down in Cornwall and, crazily it was in March, but it was snowing and we were just jumping outside in the snow. We’d just have to get on with it - in the rain and wind. Although it is nice to have the luxuries, it’s really adapted me to those conditions so, when it comes to a competition, when things aren’t perfect, I’m quite good at dealing with that.”

Saturday’s final in Glasgow, where Caudery’s winning clearance of 4.80m came shortly after seeing another competitor, France’s Margot Chevrier, suffer an horrific ankle break was certainly a test of mental as well as physical resolve.

The other jumpers had to wait 15 minutes while Chevrier received urgent medical treatment on the exact spot where they would then take off. “I ended up crying to my coach,” says Caudery. “I really take on the emotions of other people. I tried to take myself away and I just couldn’t. My coach Scott [Simpson] knows me very well. He was like, ‘Don’t hold it in, let it all out’, so I had a minute to cry, reset and I send my love to all of them.

“I had to regroup after that and execute. I am very proud of myself. I am definitely not one to out-psyche anyone. You are against yourself - jump as high as you can. In field events especially everyone is friends and wants the others to do well.”

Caudery also has first hand experience of dealing with a career-threatening injury. She was completing a gym session in Cornwall in December 2021 when, at the end of a lift, an index finger became jammed between the bar and the weight rack. Her finger was “90 per cent hanging off”, leaving her parents needing to make a five-hour Christmas Eve journey to Derby for emergency treatment by a hand specialist. Caudery would later post the X-ray on Instagram of the bone between the two middle joints literally snapped completely in two. That would require three surgeries, but she still returned to take Commonwealth Games silver in 2022. Two further surgeries were then required on her Achilles tendon but she learnt during those long periods of rehabilitation that it was possible, especially in an event like pole vault with so many component parts, 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 visualising non-stop and that’s all I could see. When I returned to vaulting some of the things that I needed to work on almost disappeared because I’d been visualising the perfect jump so much. It had a huge impact.”

A fifth place on Caudery’s return to major competition at last year’s World Championships underlined her potential and, having finally stayed clear of injury all winter, the benefits of consistent training are now finally being felt.

“I have been really, really unlucky with injuries and for the first time since maybe I was 17 years old, I have been injury-free,” she says. “Mentally I am stronger, physically I am stronger. A combination of all of that has set me higher.”

Caudery lived in Cornwall until the age of 18, where she was trained on the Redruth track near her home village of Illogan by her dad Stuart. She had been a gymnast until the age of 11 but transitioned into multi-event athletics, excelling also in hurdles and the high jump, and then focusing from the age of 15 on the pole vault.

She went to university in Miami when she was 18 before returning to the UK and Loughborough, where she wrote a dissertation on resilience and mental health. Her current training group in Loughborough also includes Holly Bradshaw, the world, European and Olympic bronze medallist, as well as the New Zealander Eliza McCartney, who took silver on Saturday. Caudery’s victory in Glasgow had followed world leading clearances peaking at 4.86m (just 4 cm off the British record) already this season in events in Birmingham and France.

After such an emotional competition on Saturday - which was also briefly paused to watch Josh Kerr’s 3,000m win - there were further tears in victory when Caudery sought out her boyfriend, the high jumper Joel Clarke-Khan, and her parents Stuart and Barbara, who had made the nine-hour car journey from Cornwall to be trackside. “It was an indescribable feeling,” she says. “Especially in front of a home crowd, knowing you have the whole nation behind you, knowing you are sharing that with them, and they are proud as you. You have a split second to fall [after a clearance] and realise what you have done and then you get to soak it in.”

A holiday now looms, with Caudery, a self-confessed “adrenalin junkie’, admitting that she will have to consciously limit some of her passions in the five months until the Olympics. That includes a desire to try sky-diving – “I will pick it up when I am done with my career” – but not those visits home to Illogan and the nearby beaches of Portreath, Gwithian and Perranporth.

“If I’ve ever felt a bit overwhelmed, or anything like that, I’ve got a great relationship with my coach Scott, and he’ll just be like, ‘Right, go to Cornwall for the weekend’ and, every time I come back, he’s, ‘You just look refreshed and re-energised’,” says Caudery. “I just love it there. It’s a great place to go home and visit. It’s my happy place. I’m a very outdoorsy person and I love being in the sea and out in the open and surfing.

“We do pole vault for the adrenaline and the rush that we get. It’s what I thrive off. Although it can be a bit scary at times, I think that’s what makes it so exciting. I think 2028 in LA will be real prime but, opening the way I have [in 2024], I can’t deny there is a shot at the Olympics. I do think I need to reevaluate. It’s crazy. It’s every athlete’s dream to get an Olympic medal. If I could get that Olympic gold one day, that would be the whole dream come true.”