Written by: Amy Van Arsdell
March is Women’s History Month, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to highlight two of my favorite female athletes, whom I think everyone should know about. Not only are they among the best athletes of their respective sports, but they also use their fame to advocate for body positivity and mental health.
Molly Carlson is a professional high diver for the Red Bull Cliff Diving series. While Olympians dive from platforms of 10 meters, she dives from platforms of 20 meters or higher, which are often natural cliffs or bridges. These platforms are so high that the divers have to hit the water feet-first to avoid serious injury. They even have safety divers waiting in the water in case someone dives wrong and needs medical attention.
Doing such an extreme sport requires a lot of courage, and Carlson has built an online community called the #BraveGang where she challenges her followers to do hard things even if it scares them. Carlson has been open about her former struggle with an eating disorder and struggles with anxiety, and she uses her digital platform to show that “even the top athletes in the world have cellulite!”
Carlson’s videos for her 3.9 million followers on TikTok don’t just show her winning high diving competitions all over the globe; they also show her “diving fails” and her panic attacks.
Ilona Maher is another athlete who gained a large internet following during the 2024 Summer Olympics, when she and Team USA won the bronze medal in the women’s rugby sevens event. Maher is known for wearing lipstick while competing on the rugby pitch, and she fights the stereotype that women can’t be both strong and feminine.
In one of her latest videos, she gave her viewers a “gentle but firm reminder” that “it is okay to exist in a bigger body.”
She said, “I’m supposed to be 200 pounds, which is what I am now! There’s beauty in so many shapes and sizes.”
Maher encourages her viewers to appreciate their bodies and examine how they think about themselves and the beauty standard. After the Olympics, Maher finished in second place on Dancing with the Stars and then crossed the pond to sign with the Bristol Bears Premiership Women’s Rugby team in England.Women and men experience anxiety around body image, often exacerbated by social media. Carlson and Maher have succeeded in creating body-positive communities online, and I highly recommend checking them out on Instagram or TikTok if you need a boost of positivity.
