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09/14 14:58 CDT Female athletes accuse Sydney Sweeney ad of sexualizing women
in sports
Female athletes accuse Sydney Sweeney ad of sexualizing women in sports
By CARLOS RODRIGUEZ
Associated Press
An advertising campaign featuring American actor Sydney Sweeney has sparked
widespread backlash from female athletes who say it is sexualizing women in
sports.
In the ad for the sports prediction market platform Novig, Sweeney appears with
little or no clothing, covering parts of her body with strategically placed
footballs and other sports apparel.
Many female athletes criticized the ad on social media and called it
disrespectful to women.
"I can't describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this," four-time Olympic
swimming gold medalist Ariarne Titmus wrote on Instagram. "How do we live in a
world where monetizing a woman's body and sexualizing women's sport is still a
thing?"
British sprinter Amy Hunt addressed the actor in a post-race interview with the
BBC on Sunday after finishing fourth in the 200 meters at the Ultimate
Championship in Budapest, Hungary.
"Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like," she said, looking at
the camera. "Muscles, hard work, sweat, blood, tears."
Former U.S. gymnast Gracie Kramer called the ad infuriating.
"I've spent my entire life competing in a sport where female athletes have been
oversexualized, reduced to our bodies, and forced to fight to be taken
seriously for what we can actually do," she said on Instagram.
Kramer posted stories featuring female athletes training with the caption:
"What a woman in sports looks like."
Sofie Fella, a Chinese-German rugby player, said female athletes can be role
models for girls and women because they manage to "untangle" from society's
ideals of beauty and femininity.
"And that's why that Sydney Sweeney ad is so disrespectful to every female
athlete in the world," she said in an Instagram post.
Novig didn't immediately answer an email seeking comment. A publicist for
Sweeney also didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
In an apparent reference to the criticism, Sweeney over the weekend posted a
series of covers from ESPN The Magazine's "Body Issue," an annual special
edition that showed athletes posing nude or semi-nude in a celebration of the
diversity of bodies.
Sweeney, a two-time Emmy nominee, starred in and produced last year's
"Christy," a biopic of American professional boxer Christy Martin.
This is not the first time her brand partnerships have sparked debate; her 2025
American Eagle campaign, which played on the homophones "jeans" and "genes,"
previously triggered widespread online discussion.
