SAINT-DENIS, France — So it turns out that amid all the tear-jerking medal ceremonies, with flags rising to rafters and the gold medalist’s national anthem blaring from the speakers, there are other ways to win the Olympics.
The old first-week Olympic reliables like gymnastics and swimming are already producing and reproducing their usual cast of celebrities. Characters like Simone Biles and the French swimmer Léon Marchand, the human dolphin coming soon to many a French magazine cover, are getting plenty of air time.
Léon and Simone: We would like to introduce you to Ilona Maher, a 27-year-old from Vermont who attended Quinnipiac University in Connecticut before joining the U.S. rugby sevens team. That is, if you haven’t already run into one another in the Olympic Village dining hall, or clicked on the viral videos she pumps out to nearly two million followers on TikTok and Instagram.
Now she has a little hardware, too.
Maher, and her teammates on the Eagles, as they’re nicknamed, had themselves a day Tuesday at Stade de France. With a 90-yard run as the final seconds ticked off the clock, Alex Sedrick of Utah snatched the bronze medal off the necks of a heavily favored Australian team to deliver America its first Olympic medal in rugby sevens.
A FINISH YOU HAVE TO SEE TO BELIEVE! 😱
ALEX SEDRICK LEADS TEAM USA TO THE FIRST-EVER OLYMPIC RUGBY SEVENS MEDAL FOR THE UNITED STATES ON THE FINAL PLAY OF THE GAME! 🥉 #ParisOlympics pic.twitter.com/1FMu9SWxDo
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) July 30, 2024
Just a minute before, all looked lost for the Eagles, as the Australians pushed the pill over the tryline to to turn a 7-7 tie into a 12-7 lead. Then the green and gold pinned the Americans deep in their own end and inching backwards as the final seconds ticked off the clock.
But then Sedrick got possession in the middle of the field, broke through two tackles and exploded into the open. In an instant, Sedrick was off on a 90-yard sprint down the grass that finished with her running through the uprights. When she converted the kick to break the tie with no time left, the Eagles were 14-12 victors. The players on the field dropped to their knees as the bench emptied into an all-out sprint to jump on them.
It was the sweetest of turnarounds for the American women. After beating Great Britain, a proper rugby country, in the quarterfinals Monday night, the Eagles endured a fairly one-sided 24-12 semifinal loss to New Zealand, the queens of the sport and the eventual gold medalists.
“It’s so tough,” Maher said as sweat, tears or maybe both poured down her face just after the match ended. “But fighting for the bronze is going to be amazing.”
The Eagles then spent much of the bronze-medal match chasing the Aussies and the pill. But in rugby sevens, a game with just 14 players on a massive field, anything can happen. In the final seconds, Sedrick made sure it did.
The medal is a huge boon to America’s small but passionate rugby faithful, but it will also provide a major boost to the fortunes of Maher and her teammates.
Maher came to Paris with plenty else to show for her work — a hefty social media following for an athlete in a sport that hardly registers with American sports fans.
But the profiles of both Maher and the sport have blown up during the past week. Every time she posts another TikTok video — testing out those cardboard beds in the village, hobnobbing with Jason Kelce and Snoop Dogg, modeling the red, white and blue Polo exercise dress (and complaining about how it forces her to basically get naked in public bathrooms if she has to urinate), the clicks pour in.
The numbers are silly — 1.7 million, 3.8 million, 5 million, and on and on.
Social media explosions aside, rugby sevens has been one of the revelations of these Olympics, helped in no small part by rugby being one of the most popular sports in France.
Nearly every day and night since even before the opening ceremonies, the image of a packed Stade de France made its way onto a television screen. Just about everyone who wasn’t there had a healthy dose of FOMO, especially after France won the men’s tournament on Saturday.
With nearly 80,000 fans packing the country’s national stadium for a sport that barely registered in Rio and Tokyo, rugby sevens has low-key been the place to be. When the French played, the building throbbed with rendition after rendition of La Marseillaise, the host country’s national anthem. In addition to Kelce, Jamaican sprinting champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce has been here. Hip-hop-legend Flavor Flav was in the house for the medal matches Tuesday.
The games are so fast, seven-minute halves, over and out in 20 minutes, including halftime. They are packed with wide-open runs, hard-hitting open-field tackles and wild lead changes.
“I suppose it seems brutality, but I love the brutality,” said Portia Woodman-Wickliffe, a veteran for the Kiwis.
About that brutality. Have a look at Maher’s camera-ready stiff-arm from earlier in the week, which apparently impressed Baltimore Ravens running back Derrick Henry. She knew what the stakes were ahead of the Americans’ final game and has a caption-master’s way of expressing it.
Get the ball to Ilona Maher and GET OUT OF THE WAY‼️ #ParisOlympics
📺CNBC and Peacock pic.twitter.com/hF8KAytAj1
— On Her Turf (@OnHerTurf) July 28, 2024
“You could leave empty-handed or really happy,” she said, inserting an unprintable second adverb into the second half of that sentence.
Sedrick, a 26-year-old, made sure it was the latter.
“I was really sweaty, so I think their hands just slipped off me,” she said of the two Aussies who nearly had her wrapped up.
Maher said she was ready to give her first-born child to Sedrick. She came into the Olympics as a niche social media phenomenon, and her profile grew, so did the pressure.
“I wanted to show people I was good at social media, but I was also good at rugby,” she said.
For her and the rest of the Eagles, their work here is done.
Required reading
(Photo: Cameron Spencer / Getty Images)