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.
“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.” Pole vaulting is a family affair; her parents are both former pole vaulters, as is her brother. Doctors ran her through her options, including surgery, but six weeks in a boot did the trick, as it healed of its own accord.
Her rehab wasn’t all smooth sailing: a three-week training camp in South Africa this January proved more difficult than she had anticipated. “Mentally I've never struggled as much as I did,” she says. “I was so lost. I was scared of pole vault, and I have never in my life been scared of pole vault.” She and her coach took it one step at a time, and on her return to Loughborough “something clicked”.
Torun is set to be her long-delayed second chance. “This year, because I've missed most of the indoor season, because of my injury, I've just been sat at home watching everyone compete,” she says. “And it's like, it's just building this fire in me. Of course, I just want to go there and do my best. But there's definitely a fire simmering.”
