Ashleigh McConnell

Ashleigh McConnell etched her name in Paralympic history at her first Paralympic Games in 2016, when she and her women’s 4x100m freestyle relay 34 Points teammates – Ellie Cole, Maddison Elliott and Lakeisha Patterson – won gold in world record time.

Despite this success, the early years of Ashleigh’s career had been marred by painful near misses. She came within 0.12 seconds of the qualifying time for the London 2012 Paralympic Games, and narrowly missed selection to the Australian team for the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

But these setbacks only made Ashleigh more determined, and in 2015, she made her international debut at the IPC Swimming World Championships in Glasgow, Scotland, where she won a gold medal in the women’s 4x100m freestyle 34 Points.

As well as winning gold in the freestyle relay at the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games, Ashleigh also reached the finals of the women’s 50m freestyle S9 and women’s 100m freestyle S9, and at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, she won her first major individual medal, a bronze in the women’s 100m backstroke.

Now training under two-time Olympian Kenrick Monk, Ashleigh is fully focussed on the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. She is aiming to win an individual gold medal, and with years of experience racing alongside the best Para-swimmers in the world, she is certainly in with a chance.