Molly Caudery: “I still don’t know what happened”

After her Olympic heartbreak last summer the world indoor champion explains why she is focusing instead on her rapid progress and aiming even higher in 2025

It would have been easy, and understandable, for Molly Caudery to allow herself to fixate on an Olympic opportunity missed. The pole vault heartbreak she suffered in Paris was particularly painful and still she hasn’t figured out how or why it happened. 

The 24-year-old arrived in the French capital as the world leader in her event with a height of 4.92m, as well as a world indoor title and European Championships bronze medal to her name. In other words, she was expected to be challenging for her sport’s greatest honour. Rather than put herself in podium contention, however, she failed to even make it beyond the qualifying stage in the Stade de France, unable to clear her opening bar of 4.55m – a task she would routinely complete in training. 

Coping with such a blow was a challenge in itself but Caudery, a glass half-full kind of athlete, instead chose to focus on the fact that so much went right in 2024. There were those championship medals to treasure, a British record to savour and the fact that no woman had jumped higher than she did last year. 

It was 12 months that the Cornish athlete began to really break through on the global scene and the events of last summer have only made her hungrier for more. She has lofty goals, in fact, for 2025.

Have you felt different as an athlete this winter, given that your base level went up so much in 2024?

Last year was my first winter where I’ve ever been healthy coming into the [new] year, which is why I think I was set up to have such a good year. This time I’ve also had another healthy winter and I’ve been more prepared for what I can do. I can train week on week and just build. This year my numbers are even better than last year.

It was around this time last year that you started to make your big breakthroughs at the start of that indoor season.

I could not really have asked for anything better. I was getting a PB almost every week and had the world lead. Then going and winning the World [Indoor] Championships… if someone had said that to me the previous December or even just before I was competing, I wouldn’t have believed them. It was just incredible and so much more than I thought I could have done. It all happened so fast, and it was [a case of] adapting to that, but just enjoying it. I had the…