Ilona Maher, an American Olympic champion, sprinkles some stardust on England
Fanfare now follows Ilona Maher everywhere she goes, but the rugby union player from Burlington, Vermont, isn’t tired of it yet.
“I do get tired a lot but, as Taylor Swift said, ‘I get tired a lot but I don’t get tired of it,’” Maher, 28, said after spending more than an hour posing for pictures with fans in Britain.
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Fresh from making her 20-minute debut Sunday for Bristol Bears, the English team she has joined on a three-month contract, Maher had to tackle a line of photo-seekers more than 250 yards long — taking up three sides of the field. Some had traveled across the Atlantic to see Maher, a 2024 Olympic bronze medalist who last year also featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition and was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list.
There weren’t any expectations placed on Maher to spend time with what seemed like every fan who attended her Bristol debut, but she did. “I saw the line of people staying out there and I was like, ‘I’m going to try to take as many photos as I can,’” she told reporters.
With 8 million-plus followers across Instagram and TikTok combined, Maher is the most-followed rugby player in the world. With a catalog of empowering, body-confident video messages, she has a global audience of supporters, many of whom are young women and girls.
More than 9,000 were in attendance for Maher’s debut in Bristol, a city about 100 miles from London. Within 72 hours of her move to England being announced, Sunday’s game against local rivals Gloucester-Hartpury was moved from Shaftesbury Park (the 2,000-capacity venue where the team usually plays) to Ashton Gate, the 27,000-seat stadium that is home to Bristol City’s men’s and women’s soccer teams, as well as the Bears’ men’s rugby side.
At that point, there was no guarantee that Maher would even play in the match after she was named as a replacement on the team sheet 48 hours before kickoff. Yet attendance smashed the team’s record of 4,101, set in 2022. For a stand-alone game in Premiership Women’s Rugby, there has been no bigger crowd.
Rose Kooper-Johnson is from Rhode Island but has been living in the United Kingdom for the past six years. The 29-year-old works at the Bristol-based University of the West of England in student communications and had never watched rugby live before Sunday.
“Hearing she was coming to Bristol was really exciting,” Kooper-Johnson said. “She has been on ‘Dancing with the Stars,’ and she’s just so cool and inspiring. If she can be a catalyst for getting more people into women’s sports, then that’s amazing. She has that ability to bring people together.”
Maher helped the United States’ rugby union sevens women’s team win Olympic bronze in dramatic fashion on the game’s final play in Paris last summer. and is now taking on the sport’s 15-a-side format, in which the matches last 80 minutes, instead of 14, and feature twice as many players on the field. This is a World Cup year and Maher is eyeing a place on the U.S. roster. The tournament kicks off Aug. 22 with host nation England taking on the Americans.
Though Maher failed to get a touch of the ball during her time in the game, a 40-17 loss, her introduction lifted the crowd and the team — Bristol scored its third and final try four minutes after she was introduced.
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