Female athletes push back on Sweeney’s nearly nude sports-betting ad

The latest:

A sports-betting campaign starring a mostly nude Sydney Sweeney has drawn public criticism from female athletes, according to The Washington Post. The video, titled Just Sports and produced for the gambling site Novig, shows the actress with sporting equipment arranged to cover her body. Sweeney is an equity holder in Novig. She responded to critics on Instagram with a post that is no longer viewable.

Details:

• The campaign: The Novig video, titled Just Sports, places Sweeney amid sporting equipment positioned to shield an otherwise naked body, including a basketball net and footballs, per The Washington Post. Sweeney is not only the face of the campaign but holds an equity stake in the betting platform.
• The objection: Female athletes criticized the campaign for leaning on women’s sports imagery while portraying no athletic performance, according to the column. The complaint tied the ad to long-running disputes over required competition uniforms, including leotards and beach handball kits.
• The athlete response: Former NCAA gymnast Gracie Kramer posted a supercut of herself flipping, running, boxing and playing soccer and baseball on social media, writing: “idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like.”
• Sweeney’s reply: Sweeney answered with an Instagram story that reportedly showed a compilation of professional athletes who had posed nude for editorial photo spreads, per the Post. The story is no longer available for viewing, and she did not issue a further public statement.
• The comparison: The column set the ad against images of endurance competitor Joanna Wietrzyk, photographed in distress at a Hyrox event in Beijing on Saturday. Several publications that ran the images blurred or pixelated them.
• The Hyrox event: Wietrzyk was competing in a format alternating eight 1-kilometer runs with eight high-impact stations. She apparently lost control of her bowels midway through the fourth station, burpee broad jumps, and finished the race, according to the Post.
• Divided reaction: Public opinion split over whether Wietrzyk deserved credit for perseverance or criticism for hygiene, since competitors in the event share equipment, the column reported. No organizer response was described.
• The precedent: ESPN magazine’s former annual Body Issue featured male and female athletes posing nude, often using sports equipment to cover genitalia, per the column. It cited skier Jessie Diggins and CrossFit competitor Katrin Davidsdotter among athletes shot to emphasize musculature in motion.
• Earlier controversy: Sweeney previously fronted an American Eagle campaign built on a pun linking genes and jeans, which some read as racially coded, according to the Post. That campaign ran months before the Novig video.

Background:

Sweeney is an American actress best known for the series Euphoria and for the film The Housemaid. The Novig campaign is the second of her advertising projects to generate public backlash within roughly a year.

Between the lines:

The column argues the ad’s problem is not nudity but framing: unlike ESPN’s Body Issue, which was shot to display athletic capability, the Novig video presents no athletic performance while borrowing women’s sports as a backdrop. Its reading is that the campaign directs attention to how a body looks rather than what it can do — in a field where competitors still contest their own uniforms.

What’s next

Watch whether Novig pulls or revises the campaign, whether Sweeney or the platform issues a direct statement, and whether athlete-advocacy groups escalate beyond social media posts.