Pole vaulter Molly Caudery missed out on defending her 2024 title at the World Indoor Championships in China last week, but has redoubled her determination to reach the podium at the next world games in Tokyo in September.
Molly, who trains with Thames Valley Harriers at the Linford Christie stadium in Wormwood Scrubs, couldn't replicate her feat of winning the women's pole vault title in Scotland a year ago.
Distracted by technical issues which interrupted the competition in Nanjing, China, for long spells, she finished fourth, missing out on the medals after failing to clear 4.75m and having to settle for 4.70m.
France's Marie-Julie Bonnin took Caudery's crown by successfully clearing the bar at that height, leaving Molly looking on in frustration, knowing her own season's best of 4.85m would have been good enough to win gold.
Molly, who celebrated her 25th birthday in China during the build-up, said:
I'm really disappointed, I wanted to come out here after last year and do something, and I know that I'm in shape to do something. But that competition was really hard. There were a lot of issues."
Gremlins in the winch
The key one proved to be hiccups with the technology that winches the pole vault bar into place. It meant that the competition was delayed for 40 minutes, with Caudery admitting she and other competitors had struggled with the interruptions to their momentum. "I'm not putting too much blame on myself. I do wonder, without those technical difficulties, if I could have gone on to jump. I think it just threw me off my rhythm, but there's no point thinking about that, I feel a bit flat, to be honest," she said. "It hasn't been a perfect indoors, but everything is a learning curve."
Her target at Tokyo in the autumn is to finally clear 5m... a feat she was a whisker away from achieving at an athletics meeting in France in June last year.
Molly's athletics pedigree is second to none. Her parents met at the track, and she was introduced to vaulting by her decathlete dad, Stuart, who became her first coach, and remains her biggest cheerleader.
Molly, ranked 5th in the world in her sport, keeps her 386,000 followers up to speed with her progress on Instagram.
