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U.S. actor Sydney Sweeney is once again facing backlash over an advertisement.
This time, she has enraged female athletes around the world with a nude sports gambling ad — and her response.
The Novig sports prediction ad, posted online Sept. 9 and viewed nearly 39 million times by Monday morning, features Sweeney holding various pieces of sports equipment in front of what looks like her otherwise naked body, as bass music plays in the background.
“Think you know sports? Prove it,” says the star of Euphoria and The Housemaid at the beginning of the ad as she holds a football in front of each breast.
In other shots, she perches on a basketball net while spinning a ball with only her hair covering her, holds a football in front of her pelvis, lies nude on a bench with a soccer ball resting on her feet and swings a golf club wearing only white underwear.
It set off a backlash from female athletes and Olympians who say the ad sexualizes women in sport and sets them back. The criticism crosses borders and a range of sports, with many posting “Dear Sydney Sweeney” videos on social media in response.
“Dear Sydney Sweeney, this is women in sports,” Canadian sprint canoeist Sophia Jensen posted on TikTok on Sunday, alongside a video where the world champion competes on the water and trains in the gym.
“Hey Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like,” Canadian figure skater Madeline Schizas posted on Instagram with a similar video where she competes and trains on and off the ice.
“IDK what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sport looks like,” posted U.S. gymnast Gracie Kramer over a similar montage.
British sprinter Amy Hunt got a word in during a post-race interview on Sunday, after she finished fourth in the 200-metre final at the Ultimate Championship in Budapest.
“Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like,” Hunt told BBC Sport, adding “hard work, blood, sweat, tears.”
Australian swimmer Ariarne Titmus, the reigning Olympic champion in the 400-metre freestyle, called the ad “a kick in the face” on Instagram.
“How do we live in a world where monetizing a woman’s body and sexualizing women’s sport is still a thing?” she said, according to Australia’s ABC News.
Novig CEO and co-founder Jacob Fortinsky praised the brand campaign for highlighting a platform that’s “singularly focused on sports.”
“Sydney helped bring that message to life in a way that’s impossible to ignore,” Fortinsky said in a press release the same day the ad launched.
In the same press release, Sweeney called the campaign “a fun idea” that “brings that idea to life with confidence, humor and a playful edge.”
Not her 1st controversial ad
If this is sounding familiar, Sweeney faced similar backlash last year over an American Eagle advertisement that was criticized for promoting white standards of beauty at best, and eugenics at worst.
In the ad, Sweeney makes a play on words between jeans (the clothing item) and genes (the genetic material).
“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour. My jeans are blue,” Sweeney said in the ad.
Some internet commentators read the ad as having eugenicist undertones. Eugenics is a discredited idea that the human race could be improved by selectively breeding for certain traits.
At the time, the blond-haired, blue-eyed actor stood by the ad and downplayed the reaction, which included support from U.S. President Donald Trump, who called it the “HOTTEST ad out there.”
Sweeney appeared to take a more overt approach to the backlash against her new ad, posting a series of photos on Instagram on Sunday that showed magazine covers with male and female athletes posing in little to no clothing.
Morgan Westcott, a marketing professor at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, says the American Eagle ad does not signal a ‘shift,’ but rather reflects a ‘recycled concept’ and a clear call to their target market.
This move prompted even more backlash. Canadian alpine skier Cassidy Gray called it “idiotic” and “senseless.”
“It’s not a joke when your life is actually you being a female athlete, and you being sexualized or not taken seriously and not given the same opportunities, and then you see one of the most famous actresses in the world going and completely wiping away all the work that you have done to be taken seriously,” Gray posted in an emotional video on TikTok.
Gray also responded to those who might say it’s just a commercial and not meant to be taken so seriously.
“I fear you’re just out of touch, because it really is that deep.”
Female athletes have historically been marketed in an over-sexualized manner, with a greater focus on their appearance than their skills.
This also extends to sports coverage, with women at the Tokyo 2021 Olympics 10 times more likely to be “visually objectified” with a camera angle than men, according to a report from The Representation Project. Researchers defined visual objectification as when a camera panned across an athlete’s body or focused on a specific body part in a sexualizing way.
The same study found female athletes were more likely to be infantilized by commentators, often called “young ladies” and “girls.”
Another recent study from World Athletics found that female athletes were consistently targeted by online abuse more than their male counterparts at four global sporting events, including the 2024 Paris Olympics.
