This article was originally published on Crafting Your Home. A human contributor also wrote and edited the post.
The post Sydney Sweeney’s Nearly Naked Betting Ad Just Turned the Olympics Into Her Biggest Critics first appeared on Crafting Your Home
Sydney Sweeney has built a career on turning heads, but her latest ad campaign has done something a little different this time around: it has united some of the world’s most accomplished female athletes against her.
The actress stripped down for a new campaign with sports betting platform Novig, posing fully or nearly nude while covering herself with a rotating cast of footballs, tennis rackets, basketballs and baseball bats under the tagline “just sports.”
What was meant to be a cheeky marketing stunt has instead sparked a wave of criticism from Olympians and professional athletes worldwide, who say the ad sets women’s sports back rather than celebrating it.
The campaign dropped last week and quickly racked up staggering numbers online, with Novig’s Instagram reel alone pulling in 37 million views within four days, according to CNN.
In the clips, Sweeney can be seen lying naked atop a basketball, gripping a tennis racket with nothing else covering her, and mock playing golf, ice hockey and baseball while wearing little to nothing at all.
The tagline played on the idea that Novig lets users bet on “just sports,” as opposed to competitors that allow wagers on everything from politics to wars, but for a growing number of female athletes, the joke landed very differently than intended.
Olympians Call the Ad a ‘Kick in the Face’ to Women Who Built Their Careers on Sweat, Not Sex Appeal
The strongest reaction came from four-time Olympic gold medalist Ariarne Titmus, the Australian swimming champion, who did not hold back when she addressed the ad on her Instagram story that has since-expired. “I can’t describe how infuriated I feel when I watch this,” Titmus wrote, according to Deadline.
She went on to explain exactly why the campaign struck such a nerve for someone who has spent her entire life in competitive sport. “Not only is it a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft, but every woman who enjoys sports for what it really is, teamwork, friendship, dedication, excellence, unity,” she wrote.
Titmus closed her post with a question aimed squarely at the culture that produced the campaign in the first place, asking how the world still allows “monetising a woman’s body and sexualising women’s sport” to be treated as acceptable marketing.
British sprinter Amy Hunt took her criticism straight to television cameras, using a post-race BBC interview at the World Athletics Ultimate Championship to respond directly to Sweeney by name.
“Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like,” Hunt said, according to Deadline. “Muscles. Hard work, blood, sweat, tears. This is a beautiful evening.”
Her comments quickly circulated alongside similar reactions from athletes who felt the ad reduced their achievements to a punchline about bodies rather than performance.
Australian boxer Skye Nicolson, a WBC world champion, offered one of the more nuanced takes on the controversy while still firmly criticizing the campaign.
She argued there is an important distinction between an athlete naturally looking strong and confident because of her sport, and a brand using sex appeal to sell the idea of sport itself.
“There’s a big difference between looking ‘sexy’ because you do sport compared to using sex to sell ‘sport’,” Nicolson wrote in an Instagram story, according to Deadline.
She added a broader point that echoed through much of the athlete response online, saying “there is nothing wrong with looking good and doing sport and there’s nothing wrong with embracing your femininity while also being a badass athlete.”
Not every reaction stayed quite so measured, and some athletes leaned into blunt frustration rather than careful framing.
Australian water polo silver medallist Tilly Kearns did not mince words in her own post, writing simply, “I absolutely f–king hate Sydney Sweeney’s new sports ad,” according to ABC News, before adding that the campaign was “so much worse” than she had initially imagined.
British athlete Lucy Davis, whose post was liked by actress Florence Pugh among others, summed up the exhaustion many athletes expressed with a single pointed line. “I don’t know wtf Sydney Sweeney was doing, but it’s 2026,” Davis wrote, according to both Deadline and Variety. “Stop sexualizing women in sport.”
Professional athletes outside the Olympic circuit joined in as well, with runner Georgia Palmateer telling CNN she was stunned by how quickly the ad seemed to undo progress the women’s sports world has spent years building.
“Just absolute utter disbelief, incredibly disappointing, like, how far you can put women’s sports backwards in the space of a 42-second commercial,” Palmateer said, adding that the campaign was “very damaging, especially for young females getting into sport, for females in sport, for females in general, just hypersexualized content.”
Athletes Fought Back With Their Own Highlight Reels, and Sweeney Responded in Her Own Way
The backlash did not stay confined to strongly worded posts. It quickly evolved into something closer to a counter-campaign, as athletes worldwide began posting footage of their actual athletic accomplishments alongside pointed captions contrasting their work with Sweeney’s ad.
Former collegiate gymnast and current TikTok personality Gracie Kramer shared a highlight reel from her career that has since surpassed one million likes, captioning it, “idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sport looks like,” according to Yahoo Sports and Variety.
Australian Olympians including Bree Masters and Lauren Ryan joined the trend with their own footage, using similar language to reframe the conversation around what women’s sports actually look like on the field, in the pool and in the ring.
Sweeney herself has not issued a direct statement addressing the criticism, and both she and Novig have been approached for comment, Deadline reported.
She did, however, appear to respond in a more indirect way over the weekend, posting a series of Instagram Stories featuring images from ESPN The Magazine’s “Body Issue,” an 11-year-running feature that photographed elite athletes nude or semi-nude before it ended in 2019.
The images Sweeney shared reportedly included tennis legend Serena Williams, soccer star Megan Rapinoe, UFC icon Ronda Rousey and NFL great Rob Gronkowski, among other athletes who had participated in the magazine’s famous spread, according to ABC News and CNN.
This is not the first time Sweeney’s ad work has landed her in the middle of a cultural firestorm.
The Novig backlash follows closely on the heels of her American Eagle campaign built around a “great jeans” tagline, a play on words that drew significant criticism after some viewers interpreted the phrasing, paired with Sweeney’s own delivery about genes being “passed down from parents to offspring,” as an uncomfortable nod toward eugenics rhetoric.
That controversy has continued to shadow her public image even as the Novig ad has taken over the conversation this week, with Variety reporting that Sweeney lost more than 200,000 Instagram followers in the days following the campaign’s release.
For now, the conversation shows no signs of slowing down, as more athletes continue adding their voices and their own footage to the growing pushback.
What began as a single sports betting commercial has become a much larger, very public argument over who gets to define what women’s sports look like, and whether a viral ad built around nudity and clever wordplay can ever be separated from the athletes it claims to celebrate.
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