A sports prediction platform's advertising campaign has turned into a flashpoint over how women's sport is portrayed. The ad, made for Novig and starring American actor Sydney Sweeney, shows her largely unclothed, shielding herself with footballs and other sports gear. The reaction from elite female athletes was swift and severe.
Ariarne Titmus, the Australian swimmer with four Olympic gold medals, said on Instagram that watching the ad left her infuriated, asking why monetising a woman's body and sexualising women's sport is still acceptable. British sprinter Amy Hunt took the criticism directly to the camera, addressing Sweeney in a BBC interview after finishing fourth in the 200 metres at the Ultimate Championship in Budapest: "this is what women in sport look like — muscles, hard work, sweat, blood, tears."
Others joined in with personal angles. Former US gymnast Gracie Kramer described a career spent in a sport where female athletes have been reduced to their bodies and had to fight to be judged on ability. She posted training footage of women athletes captioned "what a woman in sports looks like." Sofie Fella, a Chinese-German rugby player, argued that female athletes matter as role models precisely because they break free from narrow beauty standards — which, she said, makes the ad disrespectful to female athletes everywhere.
Neither Novig nor Sweeney's publicist responded to requests for comment. Sweeney appeared to answer indirectly, posting a series of covers from ESPN The Magazine's former "Body Issue," the edition that featured athletes posing nude or semi-nude in a project framed around celebrating bodies of all types — an implied distinction between athletic self-representation and marketing built on a celebrity's body.
Context matters here. Sweeney, a two-time Emmy nominee, starred in and produced "Christy," last year's biopic of American boxer Christy Martin, so she has genuine ties to women's sport stories. This is also not her first brush with advertising controversy: her 2025 American Eagle campaign, which riffed on the "jeans/genes" wordplay, set off a major online debate of its own.
Why should this land on a travel and holiday site? Because sport is travel. Millions of people — increasingly women — plan trips around major competitions, from Olympic swim sessions to athletics championships in Budapest, and the way women's sport is marketed shapes how seriously it is taken, how it is funded, and how welcome fans feel. When athletes with the profile of Titmus and Hunt call out a major campaign, it signals a shift in expectations that brands, broadcasters and event hosts alike are having to reckon with. For travellers who follow women's sport, it is a story about the culture surrounding the events they buy tickets to.
The practical takeaway is simple: expect the conversation around women's sport, sponsorships and athlete imagery to keep heating up heading into a busy calendar of global competitions, and expect athletes themselves to keep controlling the narrative — on their own terms.
Story first reported by Japan Today.