Just Sports, Except for the Part That Isn't
There is a shot, near the end of the new Novig ad, of Sydney Sweeney balanced on a basketball rim, wearing nothing at all. It is lit like a fragrance campaign and cut like a thirst trap. It arrives after a minute of the actress draped in nothing but the occasional football, murmuring the company's tagline like a dare: Think you know sports? Prove it. Novig, a newly launched sports betting platform, wanted a campaign that said it was only about sports, nothing else. So it hired an actress with no competitive athletic background, undressed her, and had her say the word "sports" while covering her breasts with equipment. The irony is not incidental. It is the entire concept.
The tagline is where the ad fails before it even gets to the nudity. Sports has never been just sports, and treating that as a punchline is a privilege most people never get to hold. It wasn't just sports in Berlin in 1936, when Jesse Owens won four gold medals in front of Hitler and came home to a country that still wouldn't let him ride in the front of a bus. It isn't just sports when a flag decides who walks into an opening ceremony, or when athletes from certain countries compete under a blank "neutral" banner. It isn't just sports when Palestinian athletes and coaches have been dying in Gaza since October 2023, or when the Ukrainian sports ministry counts hundreds of its own dead since Russia's full-scale invasion began. And it isn't just sports for the millions of children too malnourished to run the length of a street-football pitch, in places where a ball is a luxury long before it's a game. Access itself is distributed by privilege and geography before a whistle ever blows. Novig's tagline asks us to pretend none of that is true. That pretending is the whole product.
Which is what makes the choice of Sweeney political too, whether Novig meant it that way or not. Deciding whose body gets to stand in for "sports"—one of the most recognizable sex symbols in contemporary pop culture with no relationship to competition, styled for desire rather than achievement—is not a neutral casting decision. It is a statement about whose image the industry still trusts to sell itself, made in the same week actual athletes were fighting for a fraction of that platform. Deciding who gets to stand in for an idea tells us something about the idea itself.
There are ways to photograph a naked woman that make you think about her body as powerful, athletic, human. There are ways that make the body the subject without making the woman into an object. The history of editorial photography is full of them. The difference between that and something approaching soft pornography is not whether the person is naked. It is what the camera is asking you to see.
The 2009 ESPN Body Issue re-shared by Sweeney understood this. When Serena Williams and Ronda Rousey appeared nude, the nudity was inseparable from the thing their bodies had actually done. Williams' and Rousey's Body Issue shoots were editorial, the body as an instrument of achievement, photographed in service of strength already proven on a court or in a cage. Sweeney's shoot is advertising for a betting company, and it reads exactly like her brand always has: desire first, sport as prop rather than point. Same skin, opposite gaze. One says look at what this body accomplished. The other says look at this body. Conflating the two is how most people miss the argument entirely.
And it feels particularly revealing now, when women's sports are finally becoming too successful to ignore.
The paradox of this moment is that sportswomen are more visible than they have been in generations, while the culture around them still seems determined to decide what kind of visibility they deserve. We can have the female footballer, the gymnast, the driver, the swimmer, provided we remain interested in her body. We can celebrate women's sport, but the old machinery of attention still knows how to make a woman more marketable by making her sexy than by making her excellent.
It makes sense why backlash was immediate, and it came largely from the people the ad claimed to represent. Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus accused the campaign of turning women's sport into a punchline; surfer Felicity Palmateer called it damaging to young girls entering the sport; gymnast Gracie Kramer and sprinter Bree Masters both posted footage of themselves competing, captioned, essentially, this is what women in sports actually look like.
Abbi Pulling, the 2024 F1 Academy champion and one of the most accomplished young drivers in motorsport, posted on X that she'd only just caught up on "this whole Sydney Sweeney thing," and didn't like to swear, but: what the f**k. She later on replied to a commenter, saying it was sad that an ad had generated more attention than women actually achieving things in their sport, built around someone with no connection to it at all.
I posted a reel about it myself, and within the hour my inbox filled with men explaining that female athletes pose nude all the time. And they named almost every single female athlete that did. I had to laugh. Of course they keep tabs on when women have posed nude!
A man in my comments wrote that if Sydney Sweeney had ruined women's image in sports, maybe that image wasn't very strong to begin with. He meant it as a sort of “gotcha!” comment, but he was, without meaning to be, correct—and that's precisely the problem. The image was never strong, because it was never allowed to become strong. Women in sports and the women covering them have been building on ground that was never leveled for us, one hard-won credential at a time, in an industry that still treats our presence as a variable rather than a given.
You can see that fragility as a statistic: F1 Academy, the sport's only proving ground for female drivers, races fourteen times across six rounds a year, and until a 2027 exemption, capped every driver at two seasons before pushing her out, win or lose, ready or not. That is what "the image" actually looks like up close: thin, provisional, argued for every single season. It doesn't take a conspiracy to knock something that thin off balance. It takes one ad with enough reach.
I know that ground because I've worked it. I gave up a fixed address to chase race cars around the world, self-funded, building a portfolio for years before I let myself near a camera, because I wanted to be read as a journalist first, not an influencer who'd wandered onto a grid. I've learned to be presentable without ever being "too done up," because the moment you look too finished, your opinion stops being read as an opinion—the tightrope every conventionally attractive woman in this industry walks, enough polish to hold an audience, never enough to be mistaken for the product. I'm also a woman of color from outside the UK and the United States, in a field still overwhelmingly staffed by neither, which means every inch of that tightrope was earned twice. None of us who've done that work were asking for credit. We were simply asking to take up space in the room Sweeney's ad just spent a week filling with something else entirely.
That's the actual complaint, and it has nothing to do with modesty. We didn't need the image to be indestructible for this to leave a mark. We needed it left alone long enough to keep building. Sweeney will age out of this eventually; some newer face will take the next "just sports" brief, and an industry that has always rewarded this exact trade will reach for her instead. The question worth asking isn't whether that next woman will pose nude. It's whether anyone green-lighting the ad will have thought, even once, about how much thinner the ground is than they assumed, or how much less "just sports" ever was.
