Jimmy Mooney

Jimmy Mooney started yacht racing before he was a teenager and when he was 12 won the 12-foot dinghy International Championship of Ireland with his brother. Jimmy progressed to the Dublin Bay Mermaid class and in 1941 had many triumphs as a 21-year-old with Minx before moving up to the 14-foot class, where he continued to enjoy success with his dinghy Dawn.

Mooney studied medicine and later became a Dublin dentist like his father. Jimmy went to the 1948 Olympic sailing regatta at Torbay as both the reigning Irish Dinghy Racing Association (IDRA) 14-foot champion and Firefly Champion. He made a second Olympic appearance during the 1960 Roma Olympics, when he took part in the three-man Dragon class with doctors Robin Benson and David Ryder aboard Aletta.

In 1958 Mooney, along with Benson and Ryder, won one of Britain’s most coveted yachting prizes in Dragon racing, the Edinburgh Cup (now regarded as the British Open National Dragon Championship). Mooney had previously won the Cup in 1953. Both his triumphs were on Belfast Lough at Cultra, Northern Ireland.

A member of the Royal St George’s Yacht Club at Dún Laoghaire, Mooney was a former secretary of the IDRA and an official of the Irish Yachting Association. Mooney, who died of spinal cancer just four days after his 52nd birthday, was married to Sheila O’Sullivan, the sister of actress Maureen O’Sullivan, who played Johnny Weismuller’s Jane in the Tarzan movies.