Chelsea Warr – UK Sport’s deputy director of performance – has been promoted to the body's top performance role to replace Simon Timson.

Warr will become director of performance in October following the Rio Olympic Games and Paralympics. She replaces Timson who is leaving to join the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA).

Upon her official appointment, Warr will oversee the strategic investments made by the UK Sport board to national governing bodies (NGBs), and be in charge of £350m (US$460.2m, €414.7m) in exchequer and National Lottery funding ahead of the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics and the Tokyo 2020 Summer Games.

According to UK Sport, Warr – who has been with the elite performance quango since 2005 – beat a number of external candidates to the role. Prior to that she was world class development manager at British Diving and Swimming, and also had a stint at the Australian Institute of Sport.

Warr said she was “honoured, privileged and excited” to take the high performance system into “the next stage of its evolution”.

“In order to maintain success at the highest level you need to learn faster than the opposition and make less mistakes by drawing on the collective might,” she added. “My ambition is to ensure we fully harness the huge wealth of brilliant ideas and expertise we have inside and also outside our world class system to help us achieve even more in the future.”

UK Sport chief executive Liz Nicholl said Warr was the “unanimous choice” to replace Timson, adding: “She is perfectly placed to take up the challenge as she has already made a significant contribution to the transformation of the British high performance system in the past decade and more recently, the creation of the UK’s ambitious high performance strategy through to Tokyo 2020.”