USA Rugby Star Ilona Maher Absolutely Threw A Japanese Player To The Ground On An Incredible Run

One of the great things about the Olympics is that it can turn stars in relatively niche sports into icons on a national and international stage, at least for a few weeks. While we typically see swimmers, track stars, and gymnasts burst into the national consciousness at the Summer Games, sometimes other smaller sports (or, more accurately, smaller in the United States) can see an athlete turn into a household name.

This year, that athlete may be rugby star Ilona Maher, who is certainly not an unknown — she has amassed 1.3 million followers on Instagram — but wasn’t someone who came into the Olympics on the radar of a lot of sports fans. Maher’s built that social media following by being incredibly funny off the pitch, but on it she is an absolute beast. That’s a good combination of charisma and talent, and as Team USA got rolling on Sunday in a 36-7 rout of Japan, that saw Maher author one of the highlights of the day when she stiff armed a poor Japanese player straight to hell on a scoring run.

This is straight out of the Derrick Henry playbook and Maher looks like a similarly freakish combination of size, speed, and power on the rugby pitch that Henry is on the gridiron. There are few things American sports fans love more than a big, strong athlete that throws around opponents, so if Maher keeps doing this she will end up as one of the faces of this year’s Olympics — and maybe we can revive “JACKED UP!” for rugby.