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. Naturally an upbeat and bubbly person, she tried not to dwell on an undeniably miserable situation. “I was determined not to let it kind of, get me down or change anything in my life,” she says. “I was just wandering around Tokyo on my crutches. Not that there’s loads of positives, but taking the positives where you can.”

Pole vaulting is a family affair; her parents are both former pole vaulters, as is her brother. As a youngster growing up in Cornwall Caudery was coached by her father until she was 18, while her mum supported her from the stands at every competition. They could all empathise with what the Red Bull athlete was going through; Caudery laughs as she says, “My mum, she feels the pain almost more than I do.”

Doctors ran her through her options, including surgery. “I’m like, five minutes after my injury, adrenaline is everywhere, emotions are super high, and it is a lot to take in. I actually just went off on my holiday with my family, and let it do its thing.” Six weeks in a boot did the trick, as it healed of its own accord. “Whether that just came from actually not stressing too much and just kind of enjoying my life, I don’t know.”

Caudery was in tears as she ruptured ligaments in her ankle in Tokyo last summer (Reuters)
It followed heartbreak in Paris the previous year (AFP via Getty Images)

Her rehab wasn’t all smooth sailing: a three-week training camp in South Africa this January proved more difficult than she had anticipated. Previous injuries had come from regular wear and tear or freak accidents; this was the first time she was injured actually pole vaulting, and it produced a frustrating mental block she compares to the “yips”, issues with twisting in the air more commonly associated with gymnastics.

“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, stopping training sessions immediately when she began to lose confidence or feel unbalanced, and she took to writing all of her “crazy thoughts” down in a journal. Going back to basics was the perfect approach and on her return to Loughborough “something clicked”.

Her title defence ended in a fourth-place finish but she is desperate to regain the indoor crown this year (David Davies/PA Wire)

Her lengthy layoff and stop-start last two seasons has only made her more impatient to get back to the top. She lifted the world indoor crown two years ago; last year she was fourth, “and that’s never fun,” she says. 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.”

Which brings us back to Paris. When I say I’m going to ask about it again she smiles ruefully and says, “It’s okay, I’ve made my peace.”

That fateful day Caudery was the only entrant who elected to skip the 4.40m attempt, choosing to enter at 4.55m. Only a few weeks earlier she cleared 4.83m to win the British outdoor title, and earlier in the summer she had set a new national record of 4.92m, so in theory it should have been a breeze. But she failed to clear the bar with her three tries; nine other athletes advanced at just 4.40m.

“That was really hard,” she says. “In Tokyo, it kind of got taken away from me because I got injured. It’s always easier. Whereas [in Paris] I just messed up, it was 100 per cent on me.

“Again, I don’t dwell on it loads, because what can you do? If I could turn back the clock and go again, of course I would. I try not to have regrets, and I learned from it and all of that. But the heartache, I think it will always be there. If I look back, or if I overthink it too much, I still get teary. I am at peace with it,” she repeats, “I can do it again in a couple of years, but it does hurt. But you just cannot live in the past.”

Caudery has re-found her flow on the runway and is back in peak form (Alex Grymanis / Red Bull Content Pool)

She has since realised it was a minor technical cue that she feels “got lost” in her process on the runway that day. “Recently in British champs I had a jump where it just wasn’t flowing, and I was like, oh, that’s what happened in Paris. Now I can change it. It just happened to happen at like, the biggest competition in my career, and the hardest lesson of my life.”

Physically she felt “100 per cent” going into Tokyo and “110 per cent” going into Paris. “I was in the best shape of my life, everything was on the up. I was so confident and happy going into it. So there is still a part of it that is kind of unexplainable to me. I say to people, it’s just a bad day to have a bad day. That kind of belittles it, but that is what it was.”

18 months have passed since then, and she feels the pressure lifted from her shoulders. It certainly hasn’t dampened her enthusiasm for another Olympics, another shot at redemption. “I don’t want to wish my life away, but LA can’t come quick enough,” she grins. “I’m not afraid of it. It’s not like, oh no, what if it happens again? No, like, give it to me now, I want to show the world what I can do and show myself what I can do, more importantly.”

First, Torun, and the quest to regain her 2024 title and prove that she is well and truly back. “I think over the last few years I’ve learned so much. Even breaking through and coming into the age of social media and then not performing so well, you start getting those horrible comments, and that’s never nice to hear. Or say, when I was younger, I used to feel loads of pressure from my mum and dad coming to watch me. But all of that now has completely gone. And honestly, when I step on the runway, I’m not thinking about anything else in the world apart from me and my jump. That’s it.”