The core dispute is not about nudity; it is about narrative control. When a sports-adjacent brand builds its message around a woman’s body rather than anyone’s athletic performance, athletes read that as a return to an old hierarchy in which appearance outranks achievement—and they have said so, loudly and specifically.
The Short Version
- Elite women athletes condemned the Novig campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney as sexualizing women in sport, arguing it sidelines performance in favor of body display.
- The ad’s visual grammar—near-nudity strategically covered by sports equipment—anchors the charge of objectification.
- Sweeney and Novig counter that the concept was playful, sports-first, and aimed at attention capture in an adult-only market, not a portrayal of women’s sports.
- The backlash aligns with a decades-long pattern: when marketing leans on sexualized female imagery in sports contexts, women athletes push back because history shows it reshapes how they are valued.
What the ad did—and why athletes objected
The campaign places Sydney Sweeney nearly nude, her body covered by footballs, tennis rackets, and hockey pads, repeating a “just sports” mantra while selling a betting product. That composition is the fulcrum of the criticism: the body is the canvas, and sports are props. Olympians and world champions described the imagery as a step backward that collapses women’s sporting identity into desirability, with Australian swimmer Ariarne Titmus calling it a “kick in the face” and “bulls**t” marketing; track athlete Amy Hunt and others echoed the theme: stop sexualizing women in sport. Media coverage did not chase a fringe outcry; it documented a broad, multi-athlete response across countries and codes, amplified by rebuttal videos from figures such as gymnast Gracie Kramer contrasting Sweeney’s poses with actual sport in motion.
For athletes, the distinction is not prudery. It is purpose. When the “sport” in an ad is presented as equipment arranged around a sexualized body rather than performance, the message travels: women’s bodies are the spectacle; sport is a set dressing. CNN’s straight description—“hypersexualized,” with Sweeney covering herself using sports gear—captures the visual predicate that drove the reaction. Even critics who accept celebrity sexual expression in entertainment reject it as the frame for “what women in sport look like,” because that frame has a track record of crowding out accomplishment in coverage, sponsorship, and respect.
The defense: playful concept, adult market, sports-first
Sweeney’s answer has been consistent: the campaign was a fun, attention-grabbing way to focus on sports. She pointed to nude portraiture of athletes—Serena Williams, Sue Bird, even male athletes in ESPN’s Body Issue—to argue that nudity can celebrate athletic bodies rather than objectify them. Novig’s CEO Jacob Fortinsky similarly framed the ad as sports-first brand positioning—“singularly focused on sports”—and emphasized adult targeting in a regulated market. He also said Sweeney drove much of the look and messaging and that the aim was national awareness, not commentary on women’s sports.
Evaluated as advertising strategy, the logic is familiar: when a challenger brand lacks name recognition, it buys attention with provocation; when the product is age-gated and male-skewed, marketers often optimize for salience among likely bettors. None of that, however, answers the athletes’ claim, which is about representational effect in a sports context. Intent is secondary to impact in this arena; the image either reinforces a hierarchy that athletes have worked to dismantle, or it doesn’t. On that question, the campaign’s own visuals are the evidence that matters, and they align with the complaint, not the defense.
How we got here: the long memory of women’s sports media
Women athletes have lived through decades in which media and sponsors presented them less as competitors than as beauties who also compete. Academic work and industry analyses have documented the pattern: women are underrepresented, more often sexualized, and more often framed away from performance than men in comparable contexts. That is why seemingly “playful” choices hit a nerve in sports spaces; they sit atop a sedimentary record of coverage that has taught audiences whose labor counts and whose looks sell.
Against that backdrop, the ad’s ambiguity is the problem, not a clever twist. In a fashion magazine, a nude portrait reads as art or celebrity branding. In a sports-betting campaign whose principal props are balls and pads covering erogenous zones, it reads as an old bargain: sell sport to men by centering a sexualized woman. Athletes are not obligated to extend the benefit of the doubt when the mise-en-scène reprises tropes they have fought for years to escape.
Where reasonable disagreement lies
There are two fair debates that the current record cannot resolve. First, intent. Neither Sweeney nor Novig offered internal creative briefs, testing data, or segmentation plans; we therefore cannot adjudicate whether the team consciously traded on stereotypes about women in sport, as opposed to pursuing generic “sex sells” salience in a sports-adjacent buy. Second, measurable harm. The reporting includes claims that such imagery “sets back” girls and women in sport, but no controlled studies tied specifically to this campaign. Those are real evidentiary gaps; they do not neutralize the athletes’ representational critique, but they do mark its limits as a causal claim.
Still, public meaning in marketing is not established by laboratory proof; it is established by reception among the communities whose identities are invoked. On that score, the weight of specific, on-record athlete responses—Olympians, world champions, national-team players—deserves to be treated as authoritative testimony about how the ad functions in the ecosystem they inhabit.
SWEENEY BACKLASH: Jillian Michaels told NEWSMAX Wednesday that critics are targeting Sydney Sweeney over her sports-betting ad because she doesn’t conform to progressive politics. pic.twitter.com/sRkPa4No24
— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) September 18, 2026
What it means going forward: a cleaner playbook for sports brands
Brands operating in or adjacent to sport can avoid this collision without forfeiting creative edge. The decision tree is straightforward. If you want to speak to sport, show sport—performance, preparation, consequence, the craft that earns awe. If you want to use celebrity nudity or eroticism, place it in non-sport frames where it does not parasitize an already contested representational space. If your business is gambling—a category that already carries social risk—do not borrow the credibility of women’s sports only to center a sexualized non-athlete. The earned outrage overwhelms whatever marginal awareness lift the provocation delivers, and it hardens the very skepticism that keeps women’s competitions underfunded and undercovered.
Sources:
theguardian.com, cnn.com, nytimes.com, irishtimes.com, nine.com.au
