Athletics Ireland is delighted to announce that Christian Malcolm will join its High Performance team in the role of Performance Sprints Lead. Christian brings extensive experience to the Performance team having previously served as Head Coach with Australian Athletics from September 2018, before returning to Britain in September 2020 to take up the role of Head Coach with UK Athletics.
Prior to his move to Australian Athletics, Christian was an integral part of GB’s relay success and earned Coach of the Year Award at the 2017 BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards after GB’s sprint relay teams collected medals in all four World Championship events in London 2017, including gold in the Men’s 4x100m.
Previously, Christian was a world class sprinter, having won the World Junior Championships 100m and 200m titles in 1998. He went on to medal at European Indoor Championships, being crowned champion in 2000, World Indoor Championships and World Championships. He finished 5th over 200m at the Olympic Games in 2000 and 5th again in 2008.
Athletics Ireland Performance Director Paul McNamara said “We’re delighted that Christian will join our team and believe he can add real value to our elite Sprinters and their coaches, and our relay squads, which have seen unprecedented levels of success in recent years. Christian brings significant experience and insight from large programmes with major success on the global stage, and I’ve no doubt he will positively impact on this trajectory of success.
Christian Malcolm said “I’m really excited to take on this role as Ireland builds towards Paris 2024 and beyond. There is some really exciting young talent in the system, talent that’s being noticed on a global stage, and I’m keen to support what our coach-athlete pairs are trying to achieve and to build on the success of the relay programme. The sprinting landscape here reminds me so much of my early days in the sport in Newport, Wales and the future looks very exciting.”
Christian’s key responsibilities will be to provide strategic leadership to the sprints event-group at the elite level, to engage with and support priority coach-athlete pairs and supported coaches, and to oversee the relay programme and support its existing coaching team.
