Why all these female Olympians are thanking the same person at Paris 2024

Jess Fox, Noemie Fox, Ilona Maher and tens of other female Olympians – many of whom have collected medals already – are all thanking the same person as the Olympic Games Paris 2024: their younger selves.

A new trend is sweeping TikTok, wherein prolific female athletes show off their incredible Olympic achievements at Paris, then thank the little girls they started out as – all set to the lyrics of a Taylor Swift song.

Watch the video above.

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In the bridge of Swift's track thanK you aIMee, the pop icon sings "there wouldn't be this if there hadn't been you".

Now those lyrics have become the soundtrack for incredible Olympic women to thank the little girls they were when they started their sporting career, from canoeing, to rugby, and sprinting.

Many have credited Team USA rugby sevens player-turned-TikTok juggernaut Ilona Maher for starting the trend with a video posted on July 24.

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"I'm so proud of my younger self for all she did and how hard she worked," Maher captioned her clip, which now has over 2 million views.

In it, she showed off a Team USA jacket from her room at the Olympic village, followed by a delightful photo of herself playing sport as a kid.

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Australian Olympians Jess and Noémie Fox followed suit with their own poignant TikTok videos.

"Getting to do this with my little sis," Jess captioned one clip of her and Noémie in their canoeing gear, which then cut to a snap of them together as children.

Another clip she posted showed her bearing the Australian flag at the opening ceremony in Paris, juxtaposed with a snap of her as a little girl waving an Aussie flag at the Sydney 2000 Olympics.

Australian long-distance runner Lauren Ryan hopped on the trend too, as did sprinter Bree Masters and hurdler Liz Clay.

Before long, female Olympians from around the world were joining in, from Canadian tennis star Bianca Andreescu, to Estonian show jumping rider My Relander, Team USA field hockey player Phia Gladieux, German runner Alica Schmidt, Mexican canoeist Sofía Reinoso, and the list goes on.

But these women aren't just making these videos because it's a fun TikTok trend.

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These clips are so much more than that; they're tributes to the little girls who started playing sport and kept at it, even when things got tough or the world expected them to stop.

Research from the Women's Sports Foundation has found that by age 14, girls are dropping out of sport at about two times the rate of boys for myriad reasons they have little to no control over.

There's a stark lack of access to sport pathways for teenage girls, as well as safety issues, social stigma, and cost.

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But one of the biggest factors has always been a lack of positive female role models - and now these female Olympians are changing that.

By making and sharing these TikTok videos, they're showing young girls around the world that women can succeed in sport, that they can fight for their dreams and actually achieve them, stigma and challenges be damned.

Each one of the women who has joined in on the trend - from Maher, to the Fox sisters - wouldn't be standing where they are today, with Olympic medals around their necks, if not for their younger selves.

And in four, eight, and twelves years' time, there will be a new generation of girls and women making their Olympic debuts because of these women who came before them.

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