Sports Stars Outrage Erupts Worldwide

Soccer player in red jersey kicking ball during match — Photo: Eugene Onischenko / Shutterstock

The Sydney Sweeney-Novig controversy is not really an argument about one advertisement — it is a decades-old dispute about how women’s bodies get valued in sports media, replayed in real time with a celebrity, a betting startup, and a viral rebuttal video as the new props.

The Short Version

Dozens of elite female athletes, including Olympic and world-champion competitors, publicly condemned the Novig ad as sexualizing women’s sport rather than celebrating athletic skill.
Sweeney and Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky insist the campaign was sports-focused, adult-only, and driven creatively by Sweeney herself — not designed to depict female athletes.
The imagery itself — Sweeney nearly nude, covered by footballs, tennis rackets, and hockey pads — is the undisputed factual center of the dispute; interpretation of it is where the sides diverge.
The backlash tracks a well-documented, long-running pattern in sports-media research: women athletes are disproportionately shown through appearance rather than competence.
No independent data — audience targeting, campaign performance, or measured attitudinal harm — yet exists to settle the dispute beyond competing testimony.

What the Ad Actually Shows, and Why That Matters

Strip away the noise and the core fact is simple and undisputed: Novig, a sports-prediction market, ran a campaign built around Sweeney appearing nearly nude, her body strategically obscured by sports equipment, urging viewers to “prove” their sports knowledge. CNN described the campaign as “hypersexualized”; ABC News reported Sweeney covering herself with footballs, tennis rackets, and hockey pads. That visual grammar — a recognizable actress, minimal clothing, athletic props doing the work of a fig leaf — is the entire evidentiary basis for the objection. Nobody in this story, including Novig’s own CEO, disputes what the ad looks like. The fight is over what it means and who it was for.

Within days, the reaction moved from social-media grumbling to a coordinated, cross-sport rebuke. Australian swimming great Ariarne Titmus called it a “kick in the face” and “bulls**t” marketing. Water polo Olympian Tilly Kearns said the ad reduces her to “the desirability of me” rather than competence, calling it “a step backwards”. British sprinter Amy Hunt argued that normalizing this level of “provocative sexual poses” in mainstream advertising echoes an older era of women selling cigarettes and lounging on game shows. American gymnast Gracie Kramer answered with training footage captioned, in essence, this is what a woman in sports looks like — a rebuttal format other athletes then copied. The breadth of the response — Guardian, Variety, CBC, and ABC News all documented dozens of named athletes across multiple countries and sports — is itself notable; this was not a fringe pile-on but a genuinely broad, high-profile professional objection.

The Defense: Sweeney’s Idea, an Adult Product, and a Brand-Awareness Play

Novig and Sweeney have not stayed silent, and their account deserves the same weight given to the athletes’ testimony. Sweeney described the concept as “embracing a fun idea,” meant to “cut through the noise and put the focus entirely on sports”. Fortinsky went further, telling Front Office Sports that Novig “never intended to portray female sports” and that it was “really Sydney who’s driving a lot of the visuals and the messaging”. He said Sweeney approached the company, that the campaign was meant to “introduce” a lesser-known prediction market “to the nation” ahead of football season, and that the platform restricts users to age 21 and over — his answer to the charge of gratuitousness. He also conceded he expected backlash, since “a lot of people… have feelings about Sydney as a person that predate this campaign”. That is a coherent commercial rationale — attention, brand-awareness, adult context — but it answers a different question than the one the athletes are asking. Intent to sell a betting product is not the same as intent to avoid stereotyping women athletes, and Novig’s own framing never directly rebuts the claim that the imagery displaces athletic competence with sexual display.

Sweeney’s own rebuttal — posting nude ESPN Body Issue images of Serena Williams and Ronda Rousey — was meant to normalize the concept: athletes have posed nude before, so why is this different. Kearns’s response to that argument is the sharpest point in the entire dispute: those magazine images “celebrate athletic achievement and capability,” she said, because the subjects are athletes photographed in the context of their sport, whereas the Novig ad features an actress paid to look desirable while gesturing vaguely at sports. That distinction — athlete nudity as a statement about the body’s power versus a hired face using sport as set dressing — is the crux the two camps talk past each other on.

Why This Keeps Happening: The Longer Pattern Behind the Headline

This is not a novel grievance. Academic content analyses of sports magazines and broadcast coverage have found for years that female athletes are disproportionately photographed in “feminine” or revealing contexts while male athletes are shown mid-action in uniform — a gap researchers link to the persistent undervaluing of women’s athletic achievement relative to appearance. The Novig episode is simply the highest-profile recent instance of that pattern colliding with a betting company’s need for viral attention. Commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin’s observation on The View — that men make up roughly two-thirds of sports bettors, making a sexualized pitch a plausible way to court that audience — is a real point about who the ad was probably built for, even though no released Novig media-buy data confirms it. That gap in the public record is worth naming honestly: the case against the ad rests heavily on interpretation and testimony from athletes and commentators, not on internal company documents proving intent, and no survey or experimental data yet measures whether the campaign actually shifted attitudes toward women’s sports.

Still, the weight of specific, named, on-record testimony — from Olympic medalists, world champions, and boxing and swimming stars across multiple countries — is substantial, consistent, and largely unrebutted on its central factual point: the ad foregrounds Sweeney’s body over any athletic content whatsoever. Novig’s defense explains the business logic without actually disputing that observation.

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

Advertisers will keep discovering that celebrity-driven sex appeal generates cheap, fast attention — Fortinsky said as much when he noted Sweeney “forces us into the national discourse.” But the durability of the athlete backlash suggests that women in sport now have both the platform and the coordinated will to answer that playbook publicly and immediately, turning what used to be an unanswered marketing choice into a contested one within days. The pattern researchers documented in magazines decades ago hasn’t disappeared; it has simply acquired a faster, louder feedback loop.