“They say they fight fire with fire… I meet chaos with chaos,” says Molly Caudery, laughing about the momentous, supposedly meticulously planned days leading up to her being crowned Britain’s first world pole vault champion earlier this month.
“I go to the track on Tuesday morning; I have an interview with the BBC and when the garage door falls, I tie my poles to the car,” he says. “Then the roof rack comes off my car with the poles attached. So the poles are hanging from the front of my car.
“I’m looking for Scott [Simpson, her coach] and me: ‘My roof rack is out, my pillars are out’. He said, ‘Okay, I’ll come and get you.’
“Later that day, I spilled boiling tea on my lap. My partner is exactly the same. We are losing everything. You can always bounce back from minor setbacks. “These are little things that happen in my daily life… like cutting my finger.”
This refers to how his finger was only saved after he somehow got his hand caught between the weight rack and the bar following an emergency specialist surgery in 2021 that required a Christmas Eve trip from Cornwall to Derby. He also has childhood stories of broken feet and fingers and twice breaking his nose while trampolining. Mr. Bump clearly has nothing on him.
Yet listening to Caudery is a great antidote to the stark marginal gains we are often sold on in elite sport; although the finger incident had spurred Simpson into action. “He sat me down in the nicest way possible and said: ‘You need to try to get better,'” Caudery says. “He wanted to say, ‘Just try to control yourself a bit.’ Don’t trip over your own feet.’
“Scott has had to learn to deal with natural chaos because it’s just a part of me. I think he had a hard time handling it, but now we accept it and move on. I wrap myself in some cotton wool and joke about it, but this is a very serious thing. As I get older, maybe I can grow out of it.”
This ‘cotton wool’ will now need to be implemented in Auckland; Caudery will take the unusual step of moving to New Zealand for the next six weeks, where Simpson, who was once at Loughborough himself, is the national coach.
Simpson also trains Eliza McCartney, who finished second to Caudery at the World Indoor Championships, and her departure represents a serious blow to British Athletics.
“It’s been a very natural change, but it means I’ll be going halfway around the world in one Olympic year,” Caudery says. “I can’t stay away from Scott because he’s an incredible coach. New Zealand athletics have been very accepting of me joining them. I spoke to the head coach and he said: ‘Why don’t we have another athlete come in and push our athletes?’ “They welcome me with open arms.”
Jack Buckner, chief executive of UK Athletics, is apparently still hoping to get Simpson back into a British system that has had little on-field event success in recent years. “I’m not panicking…sometimes you just 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 whenever he wants; he knows I’ve got his back.”
Caudery, now 24, had previously always assumed the 2028 Los Angeles Games would represent the best chance of ending Britain’s 40-year wait for a female Olympic champion.
This prediction had to be quickly revised after a spectacular winter that included his gold medal in Glasgow as well as a world-leading distance of 4.86 meters in Rouen. In addition to the Paris Olympics, he will also participate in the European Championships to be held in Rome in June. “It feels a bit like a dream,” she says of a month in which she suddenly went from being largely known not only in athletics circles to prime time in the BBC studio with her hero, Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill. Caudery’s Instagram follower count has also now reached almost 250,000.
“Maybe one percent thought I could get a medal or gold,” he says. “I keep talking to my family and thinking: ‘Oh, I just won a gold medal at the World Championships.’ It sounds crazy when I say it out loud.
“I could barely sleep for the two days before the competition because I was so nervous, it felt like I was tingling almost non-stop. I start to believe this a little more with every competition. After what happened last year, I definitely felt what people call imposter syndrome.
“Actually, where my nerves are is not in the spotlight. They are more on the track. “The first time I tried it, I felt like I was made of jelly.”
The player, who won his first sponsorship deal from Adidas earlier this year, is completely underwhelmed by his success after his journey began in the quaint surroundings of the Carn Brea Leisure Center in Redruth, which has the only athletics facility in his native Cornwall.
He was initially coached by his father Stuart, an athlete who competed at club level in everything from cross country, steeplechase and sprint hurdles to high jump, long jump and pole vault. Another very important foundation was laid in a simple gymnastics club between the ages of four and 11. The two broken nose incidents occurred while trying to do a backflip on a trampoline. The first was to knee him in the face, and the second was to land on one of the surrounding poles who, in his own matter-of-fact words, “went straight in.” Memories of gymnastics still scare her and make her smile. “At one point I was training 24 hours a week. As a 10-year-old, I would miss school on a Tuesday to get eight hours of practice.
“Looking back, it was crazy. But I think it laid the foundation for where I am now. As a 10-year-old, we were doing three sets of 30 pull-ups.”
“I actually had a really good coach, it was great… There’s definitely a different culture in gymnastics. I remember once we were cheating during one of our conditioning sessions and he said he had CCTV and was watching us. Instead of running for five minutes on a soft mat, we ran for four minutes and he came back and said: ‘Yes, you’ve all been doing this conditioning for the whole session.’
“So four hours of leg conditioning. We were all crying and he said: ‘You can’t stop.’ I remember my grandmother picking me up and I said: ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ But we never cheated on the warm-up again! It worked.
“A bit of tough love, I guess… not that I condone it, but it was character building. Growing up I did a lot of skiing, surfing and cliff jumping. I love racing. This is so fun. I don’t take anything too seriously. I’m just living my dream.”