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.
