Asked if she felt tired after spending over an hour posing for pictures with hundreds of fans, Ilona Maher channels Taylor Swift with her answer.

“I do get tired a lot but, as Taylor Swift said, ‘I get tired a lot but I don’t get tired of it’.”

The ‘it’ the 28-year-old rugby union player from Burlington, Vermont is referring to is the fanfare which follows her every move.

Fresh from making her 20-minute debut for Bristol Bears, the English team she has joined on a three-month contract, Maher had to tackle a queue of photo-seekers more than 250 yards long — taking up three sides of the pitch. Some had travelled across the Atlantic from Washington, D.C. to see a player who now transcends her sport. A 2024 Olympic bronze medallist who last year also featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition and was named on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list, Maher’s fame continues to snowball.

There weren’t any expectations placed on Maher to spend time with what seemed like every fan who attended her Bristol debut, but she did. “I saw the line of people staying out there and I was like, ‘I’m going to try to take as many photos as I can’,” she told reporters. 

With eight million-plus followers across Instagram and TikTok combined, Maher is the most-followed rugby player in the world. She took followers behind the scenes at the previous Olympics in Japan in 2021, when fans were barred from attending due to ongoing pandemic-related regulations and has a sense of humour that would not go amiss in some Saturday Night Live sketches. Mix that with a back catalogue of empowering, body-confident video messages, and she has a global audience of supporters, many of whom are young women and girls.

Over 9,000 were in attendance for Maher’s debut in Bristol, a city in the west of England, just over 100 miles from London, known, among other things, for being the birthplace of street artist Banksy. And just as when one of the anonymous political activist’s latest works pops up to huge publicity, Maher demands the same level of excitement in whatever she does.

Within 72 hours of her move to England being announced, Sunday’s game against local rivals Gloucester-Hartpury was moved from Shaftesbury Park (the 2,000-capacity venue where the team usually play) to Ashton Gate, the 27,000-seater stadium which is home to Bristol City’s men’s and women’s soccer teams, as well as the Bears’ men’s rugby side.

At that point, there was no guarantee Maher, whose every move is being followed by documentary filmmakers from Hello Sunshine (a production company founded by actor Reese Witherspoon that focuses on telling women’s stories), would even feature in the match after she was named as a replacement on the team sheet 48 hours before kick-off. Yet, the team’s attendance record of 4,101, set in 2022, was smashed. For a standalone game in Premiership Women’s Rugby (PWR), there has been no bigger crowd.

Rose Kooper-Johnson is a fellow New Englander, from Rhode Island, and has been living in the UK for the past six years. The 29-year-old works at the Bristol-based University of the West of England in student communications and had never watched rugby live before Sunday.

“Hearing she was coming to Bristol was really exciting,” Kooper-Johnson tells The Athletic. “She has been on Dancing with the Stars (Maher finished as runner-up in that show in November) and she’s just so cool and inspiring. If she can be a catalyst for getting more people into women’s sports, then that’s amazing. She has that ability to bring people together.”

Maher takes a selfie with fans after making her debut for Bristol Bears (Dan Mullan/Getty Images)

Maher’s arrival in England was always going to be impactful.

Having helped the United States’ rugby union sevens women’s team dramatically win Olympic bronze on the game’s final play in Paris last summer, she has timed her move to the sport’s 15-a-side format, where the matches last over four times longer (80 minutes to 14), feature twice as many players on the pitch and games are generally more attritional, to perfection. This is a World Cup year and Maher is eyeing a place on the USA roster. The tournament kicks off with host nation England taking on the Americans on August 22.

Friends Lucy Parkinson, Elvira Berninger, Abby Bevan and Maria East had travelled 130 miles from Bournemouth on the English south coast for Sunday’s have-to-be-there moment. Rugby union team-mates for Ellingham & Ringwood RFC, they usually only attend international women’s fixtures.

“We love all the other players but she (Maher) was the instigator. We were 50/50, like, ‘Do we come just because of the Ilona Maher effect? Yeah, let’s enjoy the hype’,” Bevan tells The Athletic, while East added that the attention on Maher “can only be a good thing for rugby”.

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Chloe and Luke Glover are season-ticket holders for the Bears’ men’s team, so are regulars at Ashton Gate, but the couple had never watched a women’s game before being drawn in by ‘Maher fever’. “She has brought quite a lot of attention to it so we thought we would come and see what it is all about,” Luke says.

Queuing up near food trucks selling churros and barbecued pulled pork are Cathy and her 16-year-old daughter Jasmine, who herself plays rugby union. “She (Maher) has had a big impact on a lot of young girls starting and getting into the sport in general. It has been a big topic, Ilona joining,” Jasmine says. “There are a lot more people looking for teams to join around Bristol, and with her joining a lot more people have even just come here… It was a lot harder to get tickets this time.”

Dings Crusaders under-14s girls’ team did not need to worry about getting tickets, as many of their players were employed to retrieve any loose balls during Sunday’s match. Nellie MacDonald, 12, plays for Dings and feels Maher had made “a massive change to everything already”, and her mum, Sam, agrees, saying, “The amount of people that are here, you can already see it is bigger than before.”

Maher speaks with TNT Sports presenter Jenny Drummond after the match (Dan Mullan/Getty Images)

The game was shown live on TNT Sports in the UK, and the league shared a pre-match social media post detailing its kick-off time in various time zones.

Whenever Maher’s face was beamed onto the stadium’s big screen, huge cheers erupted from the thousands gathered in the Dolman Stand and South Stand. The decibels rose when her name was read out before kick-off and, again, when she came on as a replacement during the second half.

Playing on the wing and wearing knee pads and her now-iconic matte red lipstick, Maher burst into a nerve-calming tackle within seconds. The American likes to run with ball in hand, but Gloucester-Hartpury turned up the heat and gave the home side little room to manoeuvre in a match the visitors won 40-17, scoring six tries in total.

Though Maher failed to get a touch of the ball during her time in the game, her introduction lifted the crowd and the team — Bristol scored their third and final try four minutes after she was introduced.

Finally, an hour and 11 minutes after first beginning her lap of fan selfies following the final whistle, Maher sat down for her own post-match press conference.

“I just try to be as equal as possible, because they’re going to do so much for me as maybe I’m doing for them,” Maher said. “They bought a seat and that seat is going to lead to hopefully some more seats. Fans are the revenue we need to bring in to make this league bigger. So it’s almost, I feel, like my duty. They’re doing so much so I want to do more for them.

“Some people came from America. I had some people say they came to this game from Washington, D.C. to watch… I put those (social media) videos out there for them. I want them to feel confident and love themselves and play the sport and understand what the body is capable of. It’s always just really cool that they’re out there and they stay out there.”

Maher, humble yet radiating confidence, takes ownership of the empire she has created, something she has achieved without necessarily being the best player in women’s rugby. 

“It’s cool to be the face of a sport that isn’t thought of as a women’s sport,” she said. “It’s a men’s sport. So to be the face of it and also the impact I’m having is felt across both men’s and women’s (rugby), I’ve had some of the best men’s players in the world be like, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing’ because I think everyone sees value in it. And if one rises, we all rise.

“I’m really proud of what I’ve done and the impact I’ve had on social media, not just in a rugby sense, in a body-positivity sense, the way people are treating themselves. So I’m proud. I think my family is 10-times prouder,” Maher added, with her sister, Olivia, who has moved to England with her, smiling from the back of the room. “And I love what I’m doing.”

Millions of people do.

(Top photo: Dan Mullan/Getty Images)

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