Female athletes seized control of the narrative around Sydney Sweeney’s Novig advertisement, and that response signals something genuinely significant about how women’s sport has evolved.
For years, marketers working in women’s sport have fallen into predictable traps that ultimately harmed the progression of female athletics and the athletes themselves.
The most damaging of those traps has long been the sexualisation of female athletes, a pattern rooted in a sporting culture historically controlled by men.
Female athletes have spent decades navigating a world more interested in their bodies than their performances, a reality that shaped everything from media coverage to commercial opportunities.
The male gaze not only influenced how women’s sport was marketed but also helped determine which sports were considered suitably feminine in the first place, with graceful sports favoured and powerful or aggressive ones often discouraged.
Tennis player Anna Kournikova became perhaps the most famous example of this dynamic, achieving extraordinary celebrity without ever winning a singles title, illustrating the commercial value placed on a young female athlete’s image over her results.
On the other side of that equation, South African runner Caster Semenya saw her career consumed by controversies around gender and eligibility that had little to do with what she achieved on the track.
Sporting institutions that should have protected female athletes were often complicit in exploiting them, with the Norwegian women’s beach handball team fined 1,500 euros as recently as 2021 for wearing shorts instead of the bikini bottoms required under the rules.
The Sydney Sweeney campaign for prediction market Novig reignited these concerns, with many female athletes pointing out that the advert reinforced the old relationship between women’s sport and physical appearance.
Some commentators argued that Sweeney is not an athlete herself, or that the campaign was no different from male athletes posing in underwear shoots, but those arguments fail to understand the history behind this issue.
“Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like,” said British sprinter Amy Hunt, capturing the mood of a response that came not from the fringes but from Olympians and champions across multiple disciplines.
Gold medallists including Ariarne Titmus and Sophie Capewell joined Hunt in pushing back, using their own platforms, audiences and growing commercial power to challenge the marketing directly.
Crucially, these athletes did not wait for institutions, broadcasters or editors to defend them, they took control of the conversation themselves, which represents a meaningful and historic shift in power.
As Matt Readman, chief strategy officer at sports creative agency Dark Horses, has argued, the Sweeney campaign may have revived familiar imagery, but the response demonstrated that the power to define women in sport no longer belongs exclusively to advertisers or sporting institutions.
While the debate played out online, millions of fans were watching the Solheim Cup, the US Open women’s final, and a host of other major sporting events that weekend, a reminder of where the real story in women’s sport continues to be written.