Bigger than Dupont – is Ilona Maher the woman to help rugby crack America?

Seth Meyers has a habit of booking guests familiar to British audiences on his Late Night TV show. Diane Morgan (Philomena Cunk, Motherland) has been on for a chat with the Saturday Night Live alumnus, as have Greg Davies and Alex Horne of Taskmaster. A recent appearance was one of the more surprising.
“Our next guest is a two-times Olympian and one of the stars of the US women’s rugby sevens team, which just won a bronze medal at the Paris Olympics,” Meyers said by way of introduction for Ilona Maher.
The United States has no shortage of champions to celebrate, nor viral moments to pick apart. The Americans left Paris with 40 golds and 86 minor medals, and it was a recipient of bronze, an individual within a team, that made the cut for the post-Olympics show.
During the Olympics, Maher’s followers on Instagram soared above Siya Kolisi, the previous social-media champion of rugby on 1.3 million. She is now on 3.6 million, twice as many as World Rugby itself. Such statistics will not be important to rugby’s traditional constituency, and there is no groundswell that Maher is the best player they have ever seen, as is the case with her sevens counterpart from Paris, Antoine Dupont (one million followers, for what it’s worth). Yet there she was, sitting in a chair often filled by Hollywood stars, talking about rugby.
OK, so much of the six-minute pitch was not about rugby. The format tends not to produce Frost-Nixon sequels and Meyers spoke to Maher about her birthday, the braggadocious “burden” of wearing a heavy medal around her neck (kept in a pouch knitted by Tom Daley), a video of her eating a giant croissant, and the shirt of her face worn by Jason Kelce, brother of the Taylor Swift-adjacent NFL star Travis. But Maher, who took up the sport as a teen and played at Quinnipiac University where she studied nursing, then made it into the US sevens team at the Tokyo Olympics and started posting on TikTok, did eventually talk about rugby.
“I don’t think a lot of Americans understand rugby, follow rugby, have ever played rugby growing up,” Meyers said. “This was not only the first medal for the women’s team or America in seven on seven, [but] the first Olympic medal for America in over 100 years in rugby the sport,” he added, referring to the US team that beat France and Romania to gold at Paris 1924.
“It’s a sport that just really encourages you to be physical and show what your body is capable of,” Maher, 28, said. “They want you to run as fast as you can. They want you to tackle as hard as you can. I think that just really allowed me to express myself.
“We had so many people tune into our last games. You don’t even know what’s happening, you don’t know what a ruck is, nobody knows what a scrum is, but to see people tune in and see, ‘Wow, this looks like a fun sport’.
“It’s really awesome, because we want to get people into sports because I know what it’s done for me and how it’s changed my body confidence, made me feel good about myself, and I know it can do it for so many other girls. I’m so happy they just got a taste for it and maybe they’ll go to their local club, the local college, and try it out.”
Like most sports, rugby has long been fixated on the prospect of “cracking America”. There is a (probably misguided) counterfactual: had the rugby players of the West Coast made a better fist of the All Blacks in 1913, instead of getting stuffed at every turn, the US might have adopted rugby as its code of football. Despite fears about the dangers of what became the NFL — even President Roosevelt weighed in on the “football crisis” — gridiron surged and the league was founded in 1920.
The decline of Canada shows that North American rugby was once in ruder health — on the men’s side, at least. But the women have been performing well. At the Olympics, the US and Canada women’s sides gave New Zealand a good go and finished with bronze and silver respectively behind them, beating Australia in the process. The US XVs reached the first three women’s World Cup finals in the 1990s, and Canada won the Pacific Four Series in May, defeating the Black Ferns in their last match. Both nations will be at the 2025 World Cup in England.
The rugby horizon features lots of Stars and Stripes. Los Angeles will host the 2028 Olympics, and the men’s World Cup of 2031 will be held in the US, too. The US women’s team will build for LA28 with the help a $4million (£3.1million) donation from Michele Kang, the owner of three soccer teams, through Kynisca Sports International, an organisation dedicated to growing women’s sport. It transpires that if rugby promotes clips of Portia Woodman-Wickliffe hitting defenders out of the way, or Maher boshing Jasmine Joyce-Butchers (the Welsh wing forced her into a knock-on), people enjoy them.
History has told us to be wary of panaceas, and moments that will crack America. What is clear though is that in Maher, the US has someone who has taken rugby to areas it doesn’t normally feature. Don’t be surprised if LA28 ends with Maher, and a few others, on Late Night with a gold medal around their necks.