There is no better time to throw yourself truly, madly, deeply into the fandom of an athlete you have never heard of before than the Summer Olympics. In 2021, I did this with American rugby union player Ilona Maher.
Do I know anything about rugby as a sport? Not really, no. But that's not important here. The Olympics are a season of learning, a time to invest yourself fully into a game whose rules you don't know and pick a hero from amongst a crowd of demi-gods. And yesterday, thrillingly, many other people chose Ilona Maher as their athlete of the 2024 Paris Olympics. This is great news! You are joining a large and very dedicated club. The first thing you need to know is she does something called a stiff-arm, which is delightfully literal term for this move we all love. You may have heard of stiff-arms in football, but this is different because Ilona is doing it.
In yesterday's games, Ilona had two (maybe three, depending on how you count) beautiful, iconic stiff-arms. Let's watch them.
Here is the first stiff-arm, in the USA's 36-7 win against Japan:
Here is the second stiff-arm in the USA's 15-7 win against Brazil:
Wow! Look at this fun still of Ilona just wrecking this poor Brazilian player:
This rules!
I originally discovered Maher, as I find many things, via my TikTok algorithm, begging people to please watch women's rugby sevens. Maher was inside the Tokyo Olympic Village, where she posted videos of her room, mostly talking about her career, women's sports, and body positivity. Since then, she's gained more than 1 million followers on both TikTok and Instagram, a bunch of fancy sponsorships, and dunked on dozens of random haters who criticize her body and those of other athletes.
Perhaps Maher's biggest success, though, is that she made me and many others care about women's rugby. I watched yesterday because I wanted to see her play. She has spent countless hours trying to convince people to pay attention to her sport, including filming a video yesterday with Jason Kelce that has been viewed now more than 2 million times.
According to the announcers during this morning's loss to France, the crowds were the largest in women's rugby sevens history, and the stadium was at capacity. It sucks that athletes have to have side hustles and millions of followers to make enough money to play their sports. But I am glad that rugby has Ilona Maher.
The United States rugby sevens team will play Great Britain in the quarterfinals at 3:30 p.m. EST today, if you too wish to join the Ilona Maher fan club.
