The Dancing With the Stars season 33 took place on Tuesday, September 17 and the night was electric.
Thirteen star-studded couples faced off for their first week of competition for the mirrorball trophy, and the cast ranges from football players to reality stars to actors to even the show’s first-ever Olympic rugby player.
You may recognize Ilona Maher from her social media stardom and her motto “Beast. Beauty. Brains,” but before Maher was competing in the Mirrorball she was competing in the 2024 Paris Olympics, winning the U.S.’s first-ever women’s rugby medal, a bronze.
But she first went viral during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics for capturing behind-the-scenes content of what it was like in the Olympic Village and trying to push women’s Rugby towards the mainstream.
According to Sporting News, the iconic athlete was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1996. She studied nursing at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, CT, and earned her Master’s Degree at Devry University. Talk about beast, beauty, brains.
She shared on her TikTok that she started playing rugby in high school and she played through college, joining the women’s national team in 2018. According to the USA Rugby National Team’s website, she assisted her collegiate team to three titles during her career and was awarded the MA Sorenson award, which is given to the best women’s rugby players in college athletics.
Maher has a large social media following, with 2.4 million followers on TikTok, and she uses her platform to promote body positivity and women’s sports. She frequently vocalizes that women can be both strong athletic and beautiful. She’s even been known to wear lipstick while she plays rugby to appeal to her feminine side, while impressively stiff-arming players on the rugby pitch.
She even graced the cover of Sports Illustrated‘s Swimsuit Issue, proving once again that big, strong athletes can still be sexy, confident, and feminine.
This week on Dancing with the Stars, she danced to Shania Twain’s “Man, I Feel Like a Woman,” as an ode to her platform that femininity comes in all shapes and sizes. According to Entertainment Weekly, she decided to join the show to show young girls everywhere that female athletes are multifaceted, and “so much more than their sport.”
She said that she hopes her time on the show will help to tear down stereotypes about female athletes and demonstrate how her body, and bodies like hers, can exist and excel everywhere from the dance floor to the rugby pitch.