Professional cyclists are among the number of female athletes all over the world who have hit back at a recent advert featuring the US actor Sydney Sweeney, which they say sexualises women’s sport.
Double Tour de France champion Demi Vollering, Olympic track champion Sophie Capewell and gravel pro Maddy Nutt have all commented, saying it undermines progress in normalising women’s sport.
The ad, for a sports betting company, stars Sweeney, showing her naked, barring strategically placed sports equipment. It had huge reach, Sweeney posting some of the ad to her 25 million Instagram followers, and it has since become a major international news story amid criticism from across the sporting world.
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“Maybe it’s good that it started a conversation,” Vollering wrote in an Instagram post. “But it’s also sad that women still need to have this conversation. For a very long time, women have fought to be seen for what they can DO, not only for how they look.
“And I think many women are simply tired of that. Especially in sport, because sport can teach us something completely different about our bodies. Not: How do I look? But: What can I do?
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“And being strong doesn’t make you less feminine. You can race a bike until there is nothing left in your legs and still love putting on a beautiful dress. You can have muscles and feel feminine. You can be powerful and vulnerable.”
Capewell spoke to the BBC, saying: “It’s almost like people miss the mark, they don’t fully understand why people are upset about it.”
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Nutt: ‘If this was 20 years ago I wouldn’t have been shocked’
Nutt, meanwhile, posted a social media video in which she wrote ‘Dear Sydney Sweeney, this is what a female athlete looks like’, alongside footage of herself racing and training.
Nutt, who won the Traka 560 and was second at Unbound XL this year, later spoke to Cyclingnews about the issue.
“Initially it was just shock seeing it because it was quite distasteful,” she said. “I thought we were way past the sexualisation of women in sport, I thought we were at a point where people were starting to really respect female athletes and view women’s sport with a much higher level of prestige and appreciation.
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“If this was 20 years ago I wouldn’t have been shocked. It’s quite a tacky piece of content, and yes, sex sells things, it’s a clever advert, and the fact that it’s had so much backlash obviously does boost its reach even further.
“But I think from the other side of it, as a female athlete, it’s an opportunity to say actually no, this is what women’s sport looks like, flip it around and turn it into an opportunity to shout about women’s sport and how it has really progressed.”
There have been arguments that Sweeney’s ad is no different from any sportswoman who might have posed almost naked, but Nutt sees a crucial difference.
“An athlete showing their athletic body in that way is like a body positivity thing. Showing an athletic body is an empowering thing, whereas this advert was obviously entirely sexual and not an athlete. This is just appealing to that audience who the betting app wants to appeal to.”
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