![\"Sydney](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/sydney-sweeney-poses-for-photographers-at-the-armani-beauty-NJ2OIUHEWJGCBDMNW7JPQT6STE.jpg\")
<\/p>\nAn advertising campaign featuring American actor Sydney Sweeney has sparked widespread backlash from female athletes who say it is sexualising women in sports.<\/p>\n
In the ad for the sports prediction market platform Novig, Sweeney appears with little or no clothing, covering parts of her body with strategically placed footballs and other sports apparel.<\/p>\n
Many female athletes criticised the ad on social media and called it disrespectful to women.<\/p>\n
“I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this,” four-time Olympic swimming gold medallist Ariarne Titmus wrote on Instagram. <\/p>\n
“How do we live in a world where monetising a woman’s body and sexualizing women’s sport is still a thing?”<\/p>\n
British sprinter Amy Hunt addressed the actor in a post-race interview with the BBC on Sunday after finishing fourth in the 200 meters at the Ultimate Championship in Budapest, Hungary.<\/p>\n
“Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like,” she said, looking at the camera. <\/p>\n
“Muscles, hard work, sweat, blood, tears.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Sydney Sweeney poses for photographers at the Armani beauty event during the 83rd edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy. (Source: Associated Press)<\/p>\n
Former US gymnast Gracie Kramer called the ad infuriating.<\/p>\n
“I’ve spent my entire life competing in a sport where female athletes have been oversexualised, reduced to our bodies, and forced to fight to be taken seriously for what we can actually do,” she said on Instagram.<\/p>\n
Kramer posted stories featuring female athletes training with the caption: “What a woman in sports looks like.”<\/p>\n
Sofie Fella, a Chinese-German rugby player, said female athletes can be role models for girls and women because they manage to “untangle” from society’s ideals of beauty and femininity.<\/p>\n
“And that’s why that Sydney Sweeney ad is so disrespectful to every female athlete in the world,” she said in an Instagram post.<\/p>\n
Novig didn’t immediately answer an email seeking comment. A publicist for Sweeney also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
In an apparent reference to the criticism, Sweeney over the weekend posted a series of covers from ESPN The Magazine’s Body Issue, an annual special edition that showed athletes posing nude or semi-nude in a celebration of the diversity of bodies.<\/p>\n
Sweeney, a two-time Emmy nominee, starred in and produced last year’s Christy, a biopic of American professional boxer Christy Martin.<\/p>\n
This is not the first time her brand partnerships have sparked debate; her 2025 American Eagle campaign, which played on the homophones “jeans” and “genes,” previously triggered widespread online discussion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An advertising campaign featuring American actor Sydney Sweeney has sparked widespread backlash from female athletes who say it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":600636,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,1073,409,43,64,5106,417,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-600635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-media","tag-movies","tag-news","tag-north-america","tag-olympics","tag-television","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/600636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}