Ilona Maher: Rugby’s biggest star since Jonah Lomu
Since winning bronze at last year’s Paris Olympics with the United States sevens team, Ilona Maher has embarked on a never-ending roller-coaster ride.
She has graced red carpets, dazzled on chat shows, won industry awards and acquired a growing portfolio of sponsorship deals, all of which have elevated her to a supersonic level of stardom. Not since Jonah Lomu burst onto the scene with his headline performances for New Zealand in the mid-Nineties has the world been this infatuated with a rugby player.
While Maher has embraced her calling as both a global phenomenon and a spokesperson for the women’s game, the most followed rugby player on social media admits to finding it somewhat exhausting.
Not that you can tell, judging by her wide-eyed enthusiasm when she speaks to Telegraph Sport from Adidas headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Germany. Fresh from signing a multi-year deal with the sportswear giant, she pops up on the screen and announces herself by waving wildly into the camera.
“At times I feel like I’m being wrung dry, because rugby is trying to get as much out of me as possible,” she says. “I love it, but I want some more out there. Sometimes I get tired. I’m like, ‘Man, we got to have more faces of rugby’. I’m honoured to be it, but also it’s not enough to just have me as the face of it. People have been calling me the ‘superstar of rugby’. I love that, I think that’s awesome, but we need to have more superstars coming up because we want people to come to the games. To be the face of a sport that is a historically male sport is also really cool, and helping it to grow in the women’s sphere.”
To mark her latest brand deal, Maher was presented with a pair of personalised boots encrusted with rhinestones, in a nod to her time on Dancing with the Stars, America’s version of Strictly Come Dancing, and bearing her initials across both heels. Ever the competitor, she finished second on the show, wowing fans as she demonstrated both grace and strength on the dance floor, and put rugby on the map.
Had life played out differently, Maher could have gone down a very different path to rugby. “I have my nursing degree so I think I’d be in the medical field,” she says. “I always loved nursing. I loved bedside nursing, so I think I would nurse. I’ve always wanted to go for higher level education, whether that’s a nurse practitioner or a doctor. I think I’d be in the medical field helping people, inspiring people and giving them room to be themselves.”
She is certainly achieving those last two goals. It seems doubly ironic that the sport’s biggest star of the modern age after Lomu should be unearthed not just in a country where rugby flies under the radar, but is a woman who has cut her teeth in sevens. Maher has spent the past three months at Bristol Bears turning her hand to XVs in England’s Premiership Women’s Rugby as she targets a place in the US squad for the World Cup later this year. The club worked painstakingly behind the scenes to lure the American across the pond for the latter end of the season, with the Rugby Football Union pushing the deal over the line by supporting her visa application.
While she featured in just six games, Maher’s involvement took the league to new heights. Her debut try against Exeter Chiefs at Sandy Park, where she charged down her wing and bulldozed opposition players to score (another echo of Lomu), has been viewed more than 1.5 million times on TNT Sport’s rugby Instagram account alone. While her experience was overwhelmingly positive, Maher, whose debut for the club attracted a record of almost 10,000 at Ashton Gate in January, is not one for sugarcoating.
Ilona Maher doing Ilona Maher things! 🔥
— Rugby on TNT Sports (@rugbyontnt) January 12, 2025
What a way to get you first ever @ThePWR try! @ilona_maher shows off her power down the wing with a fantastic solo effort 👏#EXEvBRI | @ThePWR | @BristolBearsWpic.twitter.com/oD3b8cJgBl
“There’s still so much work that needs to be done,” she says of the women’s club game. “Even in a country like England where rugby is so big, we still have so much work to do. The PWR is still semi-professional. We still train at 8.30pm at night because our girls have full-time jobs. We still need to get people in the seats and buying tickets. It was so great to set attendance records for all of these places but there’s still so much more that needs to be done. We need these girls – they’re so funny with such amazing personalities – to take that step out there.”
Maher’s online presence had been skyrocketing long before the Paris Olympics. Her body positivity content in the build-up to the Tokyo Games three years earlier, when she went viral for her humorous behind-the-scenes clips of Olympic life, proved a hit among those from the rugby community and beyond. Her “Beast, Beauty, Brains” mantra has been akin to a feminist movement in rugby, but even with eight and a half million social media followers and counting, Maher does not want to be put in a box and simply dismissed as an influencer.
Her stint in the English women’s top flight may have been fleeting, but on the pitch, her impact was obvious. She was one of the league’s only backs to commit two or more tacklers from at least 70 per cent of her carries, while she also came out on top for carries made by a wing who played more than 320 minutes.
“I think people forget that I am a good rugby player,” she says. “As an American athlete, I play sevens because it’s full-time and I get paid to play sevens. So of course I’m going to play that, live in San Diego, play full-time and get to play rugby. It’s very hard right now, there’s not a lot of XVs teams out there who will pay you to play the sport you love.
“I’m a great rugby player – in XVs and sevens – I’ve just had to focus on sevens because of the situation. Coming to the PWR was about getting into it and feeling it again, because they are two different games. But as we go I’m going to learn more and I hope I put myself in the position [to make the US World Cup squad]. I’m not the best XVs player in the world but I have a lot that I can improve on and I do think I’ll be an asset to them.
“I would love to play more in the forwards but I think it’s going to be more centre for the USA. I got to play one game at centre for the Bears right when I was coming to the end. But I always say I’ll play whatever gets me on the field. I like to set people up, go through and offload.”
In almost every interview she gave during her time in the West Country, Maher was unequivocal about rugby needing more superstars to cut through in an increasingly saturated sports market. It is why she spent her downtime in Bristol convincing England Women that they, too, can be content queens.
“I was on their backs about everything,” laughs Maher. “If they said something funny, I’d be like, ‘That’s a great thing to post.’ I was trying to get them to show their personality more. I kept on telling [England tighthead prop] Sarah Bern to post because she’s so funny, she has the best personality.
“I just tried to remind them that they’re amazing and that as female athletes, what we do on the field sometimes is not enough. We have to do a lot off the field as well, and I hope they took that from me. For our sport right now, we need to do more, and I think some of them are ready to do that. I hope they took a little bit from it because there are a lot of athletes who want to do what I’m doing, but it’s a very vulnerable thing to put yourself online like that.”
Maher can relate to that vulnerability. Earlier this year, she offered her solidarity to three-time Olympic champion Gabrielle Thomas when the American sprinter said she was being stalked by men at airports across the US. Maher herself has not been immune to the perils of being a social media tour de force and continues to be an easy target for trolls who have either body-shamed her for being “overweight” and looking like a “man” or for being a phoney athlete. Just last week, a user reacted to her newest deal by suggesting she concentrate on the XVs game. Maher re-shared the comments, branding them as words from a “random man on the internet”.
“The abuse is constant,” reflects Maher. “I don’t think it will ever stop. What’s so great is that I play a sport with amazing women who know and make me feel good about myself. I have friends and family around me. It’s never going to stop and even in rugby, we get that constantly. There are the comments, ‘Why would I watch the women’s game?’ I get comments about just being the Instagrammer and ‘She’s not good at rugby’. It’s going to be constant. It’s about blocking them out and continuing to promote my message. The hate will continue to come, but I’ll continue to fight it off.”
In contrast to the trolls, top men’s players recognise her value. “I can get hate comments from people who are just like, ‘Rugby this, rugby that.’ But the real guys who are playing at the top level, the All Blacks, the England men’s team, they are seeing what I’m doing and are so supportive of it,” says Maher. “It’s not only great for the women’s game but the men’s game. I get comments from the best players in the world who will say, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing for the game’. I recently got to see Jamie George, he’s a great guy and so supportive of it. Ardie Savea, too.
“These guys are the best at what they do and they are also appreciative of what I’m doing for the game, because I think it’s helping everybody. I hope we also get more men’s supporters at our games so they can see the value in it. That’s what we need to continue growing it.”
‘Passion can take you far, but it’s very hard to live on’
On the same day that Maher was presented with her rhinestone rugby boots, Rugby Canada launched a fundraising campaign to raise one million Canadian dollars (£538,000) to aid their quest to win this year’s World Cup. It is a jarring reflection of where the women’s game sits. “For a lot of us US XVs players we’re going into this World Cup and not getting paid, we’re doing it for the passion, for getting to play in a World Cup. Passion can take you far, but it’s very hard to live on.”
Later this year, she will front Adidas’s first women’s rugby boot – a landmark step in a sport which still lags behind when it comes to gender-specific kit. Even in this regard, Maher keeps it real. “I’m still trying to figure out my size in a man’s boot at times,” she jokes, in a not-so-subtle reference to rugby’s lack of female footwear.
“It’s cool that Adidas is seeing the value in women’s rugby, especially in this year with the World Cup coming up. It’s going to be a really big thing this year and it’s important that young girls see that participation in their sport matters and that it’s not just a men’s sport. Rugby is a sport for everyone, it’s for women as well. This new boot is going to continue to cement our place as rugby players and as game-changers in this sport.”
Next up, she will join the tail-end of the Dancing with the Stars tour before joining the US squad for April’s Pacific Four series, no doubt while continuing to be a figurehead for the women’s game. “I don’t care if you’ve never watched women’s rugby before,” she says. “Come to a game. Buy a ticket. Buy the shirt. That’s what we have to focus on now. I hope I bring people in, but I hope more of us do too.”
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