Accident-prone British hope for Olympic pole vault gold has learned to embrace the mishaps and believe in her talent
Until the moment Molly Caudery charges down the runway at the Paris Olympics, before bending, twisting and flipping her body over a bar above the height of a doubledecker bus, she will be wrapping herself in cotton wool. With good reason, as it turns out. For while the 24-year-old has a favourite’s chance of pole vault gold this summer – and the X factor to gatecrash the mainstream – she also has an innate klutziness that could scupper everything.
“It’s just little things that happen in my daily life, like chopping my finger off,” she says, referring to a freak weightlifting accident in 2021 that required three surgeries to repair after 90% of a finger came off. “There’s a natural chaos that my coach has had to learn to deal with, because it’s just a part of me.”
