Dave Malone has been appointed Performance Director for Paralympics Ireland succeeding Nancy Chillingworth who left the organisation earlier this year.

Malone was previously Performance Manager and Head of Paralympic Swimming at Paralympics Ireland since 2009.

In his role as Paralympic Performance Director, Malone will lead the organisation’s sports department and be responsible for the strategic development and success of the High Performance Programme on the world stage and to put systems in place to ensure its sustainability.

Malone is widely recognised as one of Ireland’s most successful Paralympians having competed in four consecutive Paralympic Games; Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000, Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008. In the 100m backstroke in Sydney he won gold and also set a new world record that stood for over 10 years. He also won silver in the same event in Atlanta and Athens and retired from competitive swimming after Beijing 2008.

This weekend (11-12 April) Malone, together with Paralympics Ireland’s Chef de Mission Denis Toomey and Acting Performance Assistant Hayley Burke will be travelling to our the organisation’s pre-Games training base in Uberlandia, Brazil, and also Rio to compete a further recce ahead of the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games.

They will be holding a familiarisation camp for a number of athletes across various sports in Uberlandia in August this year to road test their sports science and medicine systems and the pre-Games training facilities. The trio travel there to finalise all arrangements for that camp and will then fly to Rio for a site visit hosted by the Games Organising Committee.