‘There’s a fire simmering’: Molly Caudery on Paris Olympics ‘heartache’, Tokyo injury, and finding redemption
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: British pole vaulter Molly Caudery was red-hot favourite for gold in Paris 2024 but failed to make the final, before a freak injury took her out of the Tokyo World Championships. Six months later she has moved on from the ‘grief’ of losing out at two major championships, and rediscovered her ‘fire’ to compete, as she tells Flo Clifford
Molly Caudery is hoping for third time lucky. The European and Commonwealth Games medallist’s last two major championships have ended in heartbreak. She entered the Paris Olympics as the hot favourite, having recently broken the British pole vault record and as the reigning indoor world champion, but failed to make the final.
Last year’s World Championships in Tokyo was supposed to be her redemption tour. Instead, a freak injury in the warm-up meant she had to be taken off the track in a wheelchair, in floods of tears. She sustained bone bruising and ruptured ligaments, including her anterior talo-fibular ligament (ATFL), and was told her ankle would be unstable for the rest of her life.
But her ankle has healed, she is back in form, and despite all that she has gone through she is unshakeably positive ahead of a return to the World Indoor Championships , one of the competitions which first marked her out as a star in the making. The 26-year-old speaks to The Independent before heading to Torun, Poland for this weekend’s championships. We can’t not talk about the setbacks she has endured, and it’s not a subject she shies away from.
“You have to kind of give yourself that time to, it sounds silly, but grieve that moment,” she says. “I've experienced it twice in two years now, with Paris and then Tokyo. ” Her family had flown out to watch her and remained with her for a holiday in Japan.
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