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Molly Caudery’s rise has even caught her by surprise – and she has a certificate to prove it. ‘I am now a qualified masseuse,’ Britain’s new pole vault star reveals to Mail Sport.
‘I started the course in December because I thought I was going to have to get a side job to support my training and that I couldn’t just be an athlete. When I was looking for an apartment, I had to make sure it had a spare room because I wanted to make it into a little massage room.
‘As an athlete, there is not a huge living to be made unless you are really at the top, so I was expecting to have to pick that up. But I’m not sure I am going to have to do that now because things have gone so well this year.’
That is an understatement. So far in 2024, Caudery has won the world indoor title, broken the British record and jumped higher than any other woman on the planet. It means she goes into the Olympics as one of the gold medal favourites. And to think she started training for another job before Christmas. ‘It’s been such a whirlwind year,’ says the 24-year-old, who was ranked 21st in the world 12 months ago and previously thought Los Angeles 2028 would be her time to shine. ‘This has all been so unexpected.’
For Caudery, nothing has been more unexpected than how she has become a style icon, with young girls sending her pictures on social media of them sporting her signature hairstyle.
Molly Caudery (pictured) has won the world indoor title, broken the British record and jumped higher than any other woman on the planet but is now aiming to win gold in Paris
The rise has even caught her by surprise and she has also become a sensation on social media
Caudery (pictured) has become synonymous for her signature pigtails hairstyle, a hairdo she wore during her first competition this year, where she jumped a PB
‘I wore pigtails for my first competition this year and I came out and jumped a PB,’ explains Caudery, who boasts more than 280,000 Instagram followers. ‘So now I do it at every competition. It’s my new lucky thing. It’s not bad to have an image. Whether people want to call me “pigtail girl” or whatever, it’s something to be noticed by and that’s quite cool.
‘To see young girls now wearing pigtails, to know that I am inspiring the next generation, means more than anything. I recently received a load of letters from students wishing me luck for the Olympics and they had drawn my signature pigtails and written some kind messages. It brought me to tears. If I can inspire one person, it makes it all worth it.’
Caudery’s idol growing up was Jessica Ennis-Hill, who she met for the first time after her victory at the World Indoor Championships in Glasgow in March. ‘I have never been starstruck before but I was starstruck by her,’ she admits. ‘I couldn’t believe I was actually meeting her.’
Ennis-Hill, who will be a BBC pundit in Paris, tipped Caudery to win gold at the Games. ‘I still can’t believe that she even knows who I am,’ she says. ‘Little 12-year-old me watching her at the Olympics just wouldn’t believe that any of this is happening. It is crazy.’
It was around the time of Ennis-Hill’s London 2012 glory that Caudery first tried athletics, having been a national-level gymnast at primary school, training 24 hours a week. Her switch in sports was always perhaps inevitable given her father Stuart was a decathlete, and her mother Barbara also pole vaulted. But growing up in Cornwall did not make athletics easy, as the county has just one track – in Redruth – and the nearest indoor facility is three hours away in Bath.
‘To see young girls now wearing pigtails, to know that I am inspiring the next generation, means more than anything,’ said Caudery
Jessica Ennis-Hill (pictured), who was Caudery’s idol growing up, has tipped the pole vault star to win gold in Paris
The 24-year-old stated that her sensational rise to the top this year had been ‘a whirlwind’
‘I remember once training in the snow in the middle of the March before going to Australia for the Commonwealth Games,’ recalls Caudery. ‘But it toughened me up and has helped me. I don’t think it would be optimal now for me to jumping in the wind and the rain because sometimes you do need to work on technical stuff. But I just set the world lead and British record in the wind and the rain and I don’t know if I could have done that if I hadn’t grown up in Cornwall and faced those adversities.’
Caudery is typically Cornish in two of her other loves: surfing and cream teas. She even baked scones as a schoolgirl working in her mum’s café. ‘I would make them for a few different cafes in Cornwall,’ admits Caudery. ‘I would love to do Bake Off one day!’
Caudery calls Cornwall her ‘happy place’ but she left when she was 18, taking up an athletics scholarship offer at the University of Miami. There, her social life briefly took over from her sporting one. ‘I had too many distractions in Miami,’ she reflects. ‘I was exposed to this big city after coming from Cornwall and I wanted to take every opportunity to go out, to make friends – but athletics-wise it wasn’t exactly what I needed.’
The Covid pandemic caused Caudery to return to England in 2020 and she has since lived a calmer life in Loughborough, graduating from the university there last year with a 2.1 in sport science. Part of her degree was a dissertation on mental health in sport at a time when hers was being tested having had two achilles operations in six months. She also nearly lost her finger in a freak weightlifting accident.
Caudery is a glass half-full person who says: ‘I am doing what I love and I am grateful for that’
The British star calls Cornwall her ‘happy place’ but she left when she was 18, taking up an athletics scholarship offer at the University of Miami
Caudery, though, is a glass-half-full girl with an infectious personality, which shines through in our interview, as it has all year. ‘It’s just the person I am,’ she says. ‘I try and have a positive outlook on life. I am doing what I love and I am grateful for that. When I am out there competing, I try to take a moment to look around me and think, “Wow, this is amazing, this is my childhood dream and I am getting to do that”.
‘Pole vault is so much fun. Since I’ve started getting to those higher heights, you feel like you are flying. You have time to realise in the air if you have cleared the bar or not and you get to take it in on the way down. It is only for a split second but it’s long enough to process what is going on and it is the best feeling. It is unmatched.
‘When I was watching one of the England football games and nothing was really going on, I was like, “Why are people so interested in this? Pole vault is way more exciting if you actually watch it and understand it”. It’s a really cool event. I just don’t think it’s had enough air time.’
Caudery, of course, will get plenty of that in Paris if she emulates her team-mate Holly Bradshaw, who won Britain’s first Olympic pole vault medal with bronze at Tokyo 2020. It was Bradshaw’s British record Caudery broke when she jumped 4.92m in Toulouse last month.
That leap put her seventh on the all-time list and was 2cm more than the winning vault in Tokyo and 4cm more than anyone else this year. In fact, Caudery’s only real low so far this season came at last month’s European Championships in Rome, where she finished third after only jumping 4.77m. But she says: ‘Although I didn’t come away with the colour medal I wanted, I learnt so much. I love big crowds and big atmospheres, so it wasn’t anything to do with the pressure. It was more technical. After Rome I may have had a couple of doubts, but going on to get the British record just put all of them to bed.’
The pole vault star said she watched England at Euro 2024 and insisted there was ‘nothing going on’ and that her sport was ‘way more exciting’
Caudery will be hoping to emulate Britian’s Holly Bradshaw, who won Britain’s first Olympic pole vault medal with bronze at Tokyo 2020
Caudery’s (pictured) date with destiny then comes on August 7 at the Stade de France, when she could become the first British woman to win an Olympic field event since Tessa Sanderson
As she prepares for Paris, Caudery will not join Britain’s camp in Saint-Germain-en-Laye but train in Montpellier with New Zealand, who her coach Scott Simpson works for. Her date with destiny then comes on August 7 at the Stade de France, when she could become the first British woman to win an Olympic field event since Tessa Sanderson in the javelin 40 years ago.
‘Really? Wow!’ says Caudery when told that history beckons. ‘I wasn’t aware of that. That’s a crazy statistic. Maybe I can do that for everyone then. Winning would mean so much. It would be life-changing. Every dream that I have ever had growing up would come true early. It makes me very, very excited.
‘I definitely get a bit carried away but it’s all good. It’s almost manifesting it. The more I say it, maybe it will happen!’
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