If you want to offend Ilona Maher, slinging the word “big” at her isn’t going to cut it. The wildly popular rugby player—who won bronze at the 2024 Paris Olympics—is 5’10” and 200 pounds (most of which is lean muscle mass). “We don’t think of the word ‘big’ as derogatory,” she says of her rugby team. “We need the big players. We need the powerful players. I have a big personality, I have a big body—it’s just who I am.”
Maher has used her far-reaching platform to spread body positivity around strength in women, proving that athletes who tackle and stiff-arm their opponents can still be feminine. Post-Olympics, she wore a bikini on a digital cover of Sports Illustrated magazine and finished second on Dancing With the Stars, becoming the first female contestant to lift her male partner. When she’s on the field, she wears red lipstick as “an ‘F you’ to anybody who would say, ‘Oh, you shouldn't wear makeup when you play because you should be focused on sport,’” she says. “I love lipstick. I have great lips, and I love the beauty it brings out in me. I’ve never felt like I had to leave my beauty at the door when I become a beast.”
In one recent viral social-media post, Maher reminded her followers that not all bodies are meant to be the same size. She was inspired in part by the weight loss-drug culture that’s become so prevalent on social media. “I'm flooded with messages of this idea that you're more beautiful—you're more worthy—when you're smaller,” she says. “And I feel like I'm somebody who's very confident. I really do love my body, and what it does for me. I love how I look. I love how big my shoulders are.” Yet even she found herself wondering, as she scrolled through before-and-after pictures: “I look like the ‘before.’ Does that mean I'm not the ‘after’ pictures?"
That’s why she wants her followers—especially young girls and women—to understand that it’s simply not healthy for everyone to look one specific way. “Not all of us are meant to be that size. We're meant to be bigger, and we're meant to take up space,” she says. “I encourage people to find out what their body is capable of and what it can do, and to appreciate it for its function rather than its form.”