For Molly Caudery, the Paris Olympics were an unmitigated disaster, so much so that she “grieved” for her Games for weeks afterwards. Caudery arrived with a spring in her step as the new world indoor champion and a serious medal contender, and so she finds what happened next hard to explain. All she knows is that she failed to clear the bar, and her Olympics were over before they ever got airborne.
“I may ‘no-height’ once a year or once every two years, and mine just happened to be on the biggest competition of my life,” she smiles. “It’s not ideal, but what can I do now? All I can do is learn from it and not let it happen again.”
Caudery entered the competition at 4.55m, well short of her 4.92m personal best and British record set a month earlier in Toulouse, but notably higher than many of her rivals who got their eye in at a lower height. She rejects the idea that that she might have started lower too.
“People who aren’t in my close circle would see it that way, but for me, I always do that. There was no reason I should have come in earlier … I just wasn’t rolling the poles through. I don’t think the actual height of the bar would have made a difference. I know what I can jump. So, no, I probably won’t change anything.”
She admits the shock of that day took time to get over. “The weeks after were really tough. I spent a lot of time with my family and friends and it was almost like a grieving period. But then it’s like, what can you do? I can’t go back and change time. I can only look forward to what’s going on now and there is no point in living in that moment for too long.”
Caudery is looking forwards now, speaking to journalists via video from Nanjing, China, ahead of this weekend’s World Athletics Indoor Championships which begin on Friday.
She is there as a significant part of a small, 11-athlete strong British team, featuring new European indoor 60m champion Jeremiah Azu and captained by 1500m runner Neil Gourley, and she has arrived in promising form with something to defend. Caudery’s gold medal in this championship last year in Glasgow was a breakthrough moment for the 25-year-old from Cornwall, and she is determined to protect her crown as indoor pole vault queen. All three Olympic medallists in Paris are absent from the start list in China this weekend, and the door is open for Caudery to repeat the feat.
“I think I can still take a lot of confidence from last season and the heights that I was jumping and especially last indoors and getting that title. I would love to try and retain it and that’s what I’m going to try and do. And that in itself is so exciting and I know that I am in a good position to be able to do that.”
Pole vault is arguably the most bonkers of the athletics disciplines, the one whose most Googled queries are to ask who invented it and why. But it is also dazzling art and compelling theatre in equal measure, and the exploits of Armand Duplantis on the men’s side have given the event a welcome surge.
So it was something of a surprise when Michael Johnson’s new Grand Slam Track event, launching next month in Jamaica, emerged without any field events at all in its plans. “I think I can save track – not track and field,” Johnson said of athletics, a sport that only truly blooms to life at the Olympics every four years.
Caudery shrugs off the snub, pointing to the small but lively independent pole vault scene that draws a crowd of its own.
“We have so many amazing street meets,” she says. “They may not have the same exposure and the same kind of money thrown at them, but the pole vault setups are great and they’re set up for us to jump high. They are normally in small European towns and countries where loads of people locally come and watch and for me that’s so much fun. That’s why I do the sport. So I’m personally not too upset by it. On behalf of most field athletes it would be nice to have equality there but I am happy travelling around doing all these fun pole vault meets.
“It’s a spectacle to watch. I’ve been to meets in a train station and people are just on their way to work or wherever they’re going and there’s just pole vault in the middle of it. And that’s just so amazing to me. And I think if we could do more things like that, it’s such a great way to get us out there and into the world.”
Now Caudery is not just looking forwards but upwards, setting her sights on a new, ambitious goal for her season, which all builds to the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo in September. And it also helps explain why she won’t be lowering the bar any time soon.
“I would love to try and attempt five metres this year,” she says. “I’m not someone who’s going to come in at 4.70m, that is too high, but around that 4.50m mark is comfortable for me. And as long as I don’t do anything really crazy, like I may have in Paris, it should be fine.”
The Olympics hurt, but Caudery is determined to weaponise that pain.
“What I did get from Paris was an extra fire and extra desire for this year. I took that into the winter and I’ve trained so hard and I’ve come out this year and there is that extra want in me, and I think that’s a positive thing.”
