Olympic champions have rounded on the actress Sydney Sweeney over an advertisement for the American sports prediction market Novig in which she appears almost entirely unclothed.
The campaign, released on September 9 under the slogan “just sports”, shows Sweeney miming tennis, golf, baseball and ice hockey while covering herself with balls, rackets and protective equipment. Novig said the idea was to strip out everything except the sport itself.
Criticism built over the weekend, led by Ariarne Titmus, the Australian swimmer who has won four Olympic gold medals. She wrote on Instagram that the advert was “a kick in the face to every woman” who had dedicated her life to her craft.
Titmus said she had not wanted to give the campaign further attention but could not stay silent. She questioned how monetising a woman’s body and sexualising women’s sport could still be treated as normal.
Skye Nicolson, the world boxing champion, said companies of this kind needed to do better and told her followers the advert amounted to a “mockery” of women in sport. She drew a distinction between an athlete who looks good and the use of sex to sell the game.
Dozens of competitors answered with footage of their own training and events. The gymnast Gracie Kramer posted a competition reel with the observation that this was what a woman in sport looked like, and the sprinter Bree Masters did much the same.
Sweeney has not addressed the criticism directly. On September 13 she posted images of Serena Williams, Megan Rapinoe, Caroline Wozniacki and other athletes who had posed nude for ESPN’s Body Issue.
Novig has described the actress as a strategic partner and equity holder, which means she stands to gain from the attention. The company launched across the United States last month and presents itself as a sports-only prediction exchange restricted to users aged 21 and over.
It is not the first of her campaigns to cause trouble. Sweeney was at the centre of a row in 2025 over an American Eagle denim advert playing on the words genes and jeans, which some critics read as a coded appeal to racial superiority.
The dispute has surfaced two months after European Athletics and the European Broadcasting Union published guidelines urging broadcasters to stop filming women athletes in ways that draw attention to their bodies. Those recommendations, issued in July, are voluntary.
