Olympian Ilona Maher Has Built Self-Confidence Through Her Success on the Rugby Field

The Paris games bronze medalist has her sport to thank for her body positivity.

Ilona Maher was photographed by Ben Watts in Bellport, New York. / Ben Watts/Sports Illustrated

Ilona Maher has rugby to thank for her relationship with her body. The 2024 Paris Olympian feels “beautiful” when she looks “strong and powerful,” or, in other words, when she’s on the rugby pitch in her signature red lip.

She hasn’t always found it easy to love her body. When she was younger, Maher bought into society’s ideals of beauty, including “smaller bodies.” But now, she recognizes that “other bodies can be beautiful as well,” she says on the set of her SI Swimsuit photo shoot in Bellport, New York. “Like, finding my muscles attractive [and] my body [and] my bigger frame beautiful.”

Now, Maher has a newfound appreciation for her body, and her thighs and shoulders in particular. “I find them to be so powerful,” she explains, “the way that they take up space and what they can do.”

Like “so many female athletes,” a lot of people have called her “masculine” and “manly.” But she chocks it up to intimidation, which leads people to “find some way to make it negative.”

In response, Maher simply preaches body appreciation and positive self-talk. Part of that, for her, means changing the narrative around cellulite, too. Though society has a tendency to paint cellulite as “bad,” it has always been a “very normal” phenomenon for the athlete.

But even she gets caught up in the societal conversation sometimes. Recently, she saw a picture of herself on the rugby pitch with her cellulite showing and thought, “This is not a good picture of me.” But then she changed the narrative. Instead, she told herself, “I’m doing something pretty fantastic with the cellulite showing, and it’s not taking away from that.”

At the end of the day, Maher owes much of her attitude to her sport. Where her body is concerned, she has always asked herself two questions: “How can you use it to your best advantage?” and “How can you learn to really appreciate it?” The response to both is rugby. “I do think rugby really helped me to learn to do that,” she says.