Ilona Maher: Showcasing ‘Muscular, Big’ Bodies Can Inspire Girls to ‘Start to Love Themselves’

The Olympic rugby player and Dancing With the Stars finalist has some advice for girls who felt pushed out of sport.

March 4, 2025

Months after emerging as one of Team USA’s biggest stars during the 2024 Olympics, rugby player Ilona Maher decided to switch up her game by temporarily relocating to England to play a short contract for the Bristol Bears. Spoiler: Folks across the pond were just as stoked to see her dominate on the pitch as her hometown fans are.

In advance of her highly anticipated January debut in the Premiership Women’s Rugby league, ticket sales soared so high that the match was moved to accommodate a larger crowd, according to RugbyPass. Dealing with a media storm while adjusting to a new culture sounds like a daunting double whammy, but Maher reports the transition was pretty smooth. Which isn’t to say she doesn’t pine for certain aspects of American life—and cuisine. “I’m missing a good salty pickle,” she tells SELF. Veggies too. Sometimes, Maher will whip up “a little Sweetgreen dupe” when she’s hankering for the big, fresh salads she can easily get at home.

Playing for the Bears is the latest in a long line of projects that have followed Maher’s Olympic sophomore appearance. Since her team earned the US’s first Olympic rugby medal in 100 years (and the US’s first piece of hardware in women’s rugby, period) when they placed third at the Paris Games, Maher has kept busy: She’s modeled for the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated, walked the red carpet at the Emmys, and made Forbes’ storied 30 Under 30 list. Not to mention, she’s partnered with a wide array of brands—including sunscreen company Coppertone, as the face of its new Unbeatable Sport campaign. (For Maher, the partnership felt like an organic fit since she considers the brand’s sports spray products “a staple” in her locker room routine.)

As her easy adjustment to UK rugby shows, Maher can adapt to a lot of new situations—something which was perhaps even more evident during her recent turn on the celebrity competition show Dancing With the Stars less than two months after the Olympics. In this case, she had absolutely zero experience with the new task at hand, so the path was a little trickier. Well, a lot trickier, actually. “I’ve never been a dancer. I’ve never had to learn a routine,” Maher says.

The transition from rugby to dance proved “very tough mentally.” Thanks to her experience on the pitch, Maher had the strength and agility to execute all the moves, but memorizing choreography was an entirely novel challenge. Especially when it came to one type of dance in particular: jive, a high-energy style that requires, in Maher’s words, “a lot of fast steps.” “I liked the slower dances. I liked the rumba—that was my favorite,” she says. “But jive really got to me mentally in many ways and was so draining.”

With DWTS, Maher hoped to show “how versatile and dynamic” she could be, tackling a new form of movement that’s way different from her primary sport. By taking on both, she could be elegant as well as tough, graceful yet strong. But Maher also recognized that it was an opportunity to spread her message further: to believe in the strength and beauty of your body. No matter your size or shape, “you can be anything that you want to be,” she says. From making TikToks highlighting her cellulite to prove “we all have it,” to clapping back at trolls speculating about her BMI, to sharing tips for surviving bad body image days, she has consistently used her platform to push back against harmful beauty standards.

“I’ve never felt less-than for being bigger,” Maher says. “I’ve never felt unattractive for being bigger.” But she acknowledges that her experience isn’t necessarily the norm. “There’s so many girls who are afraid to try things,” she says. “They don’t think they’re what society wants for it.”

And when it comes to dance in particular, those expectations can be infamously stringent. In fact, Maher says, many girls reached out during her DWTS run to share that “they stopped dancing because they just never felt like they fit in or didn’t feel like they were small enough.”

So every time the curtain lifted for her weekly DWTS performance, there she was, showcasing her “muscular, big” body in a space typically not all that kind to them. “I was the same size, if not bigger than, my dance partner,” Alan Bersten, she says. Importantly, the duo didn’t try to hide that fact, but instead used it to their advantage. In the second episode of the season, Maher made history when she became the first female DWTS contestant to lift her male partner, according to NBC News—flipping Bersten twice during a Dirty Dancing–inspired salsa number.

In the end, Maher and Bersten finished second overall, behind Joey Graziadei of The Bachelor and his pro partner Jenna Johnson. Of course, there were critics and haters. Overall, however, “it’s been a very positive response,” Maher says—and one that has had a ripple effect too. Watching Maher perform, “a lot of people were inspired to go out there and dance, feel more confident in themselves,” she says. “Seeing somebody [else] do it, they feel like they can do it as well. So it’s giving them the opportunity to slowly start to love themselves in their own skin.”

This is huge for any group of folks, but it can be particularly gratifying when thinking of those little girls who quit dance because they felt like they didn’t belong.

“Because they saw me, all these girls were going back to dancing and feeling confident on the dance floor,” Maher says. As for girls in bigger bodies who might have wanted to test out their moves but never felt confident enough to try? Her hope is that “seeing me out there—not doing it perfectly, but doing it, not being afraid to do it—maybe sparks their desire to try it as well.”