TikTok’s favourite Olympian is again on the world stage, and she or he’s as soon as once more displaying tens of millions of viewers a glimpse into what life’s like within the Olympic Village.
Ilona Maher, a member of the U.S. ladies’s rugby workforce, introduced her area of interest sport into the limelight three years in the past when she shot to web fame documenting her candid, generally awkward expertise on the Tokyo Olympics.
Now, having amassed greater than 1.6 million followers on TikTok and 1.5 million on Instagram, Maher is in Paris sharing her newfound appreciation for handball, poking enjoyable at her personal clumsy makes an attempt at flirting, and displaying off her opening ceremony outfit. Former Philadelphia Eagles middle Jason Kelce additionally appeared in considered one of Maher’s movies, wherein he declares his love for girls’s rugby.”I knew that if I saved this up, acquired folks watching me on TikTok, they’d additionally tune in to my sport,” Maher, 27, advised NBC Information’ Savannah Sellers in an interview.
On the delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics, held in 2021, the rugby star drew in tens of millions together with her collection testing out the athletes’ infamous cardboard beds — similar to by performing yoga on it, doing burpees on it and giving start to a teammate. She additional captivated viewers together with her impression of what it is like making small speak and struggling to flirt with different Olympians, in addition to her raving over the deep-fried cheese within the Olympic Village.
Viewers who tuned in to Maher’s movies typically thanked her for “carrying” Olympic TikTok together with her facetious updates, with some expressing a sudden curiosity in ladies’s rugby after watching her content material. The athlete additionally attracted reward from the likes of web star Hank Inexperienced, who tagged Maher in a 2021 video saying he was “hyped for girls’s rugby sevens this 12 months.”
Maher, raised in Vermont, first tried rugby her senior 12 months of highschool earlier than happening to play at Quinnipiac College, the place she graduated in 2018 with a nursing diploma. She joined USA Rugby proper after school, and this 12 months can be her second expertise competing within the Olympics.
Exterior of sharing snippets of her life as an elite athlete, Maher has additionally been vocal on-line about physique acceptance, sharing that she has typically obtained feedback calling her physique “masculine” due to her muscular construct.
“There’ll at all times be unfavourable folks on the market and so they put ladies in a field, and so they assume ladies ought to be fragile and petite and quiet and meek, however that is not the case,” Maher stated via tears in a 2022 video. “Ladies will be sturdy, and so they can have broad shoulders and so they can take up area and they are often massive.”
The athlete has continued circulating her message within the Olympic Village this month, together with by sharing a reminder concerning the range of physique varieties seen amongst Olympians and by displaying off how she fuels her physique.
She additionally shared earlier this month that she has been thought-about obese her entire life by physique mass index requirements, however that this type of measurement would not relay how a lot muscle a person has or how match they’re as an athlete.
“So yeah, I do have a BMI of 30%. I’m thought-about obese,” she stated in a video replying to an Instagram remark. “However alas, I will the Olympics and you are not.”
