BY CHARLEY SCHARF ’28
Sydney Sweeney is facing yet another backlash following a controversial advertisement she made for Novig, a sports prediction market and betting app. The Sept. 2026 advertisement titled “Novig is Just Sports” features the famous actress posing partially nude with various pieces of athletic equipment. This controversy follows her 2025 American Eagle campaign, which also gained a lot of backfire.
Sweeney’s Novig advertisement currently had tens of millions of views within days of its launch, and has significantly raised Novig’s brand recognition and trading volume. However, the actress herself has lost over 200,000 followers on Instagram within days of releasing the ad. Sweeney defended herself through Instagram stories where she posted covers from “ESPN the Magazine”’s “Body issue,” which featured athletes, including famous tennis player Serena Williams, posing similarly. She noted that the ad was intended to “cut through the noise and put the focus entirely on sports” through humor and confidence.
The campaign sparked immediate outrage, with critics accusing it of reducing women in sports, diminishing them to objects. Many female athletes around the world spoke on this, including former American gymnast Gracie Kramer. Kramer posted a viral montage of athletic highlights with the caption, “I don’t know what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like.”
Jericho High School’s female athletes are also disturbed by Sweeney’s advertisement and its implications. Alanna G. ’27 said, “Sweeney’s campaign promotes the idea that women knew less about sports or were not as valuable as men.” As a female athlete herself, Alanna said, “the campaign should not have been put out because it creates a negative connotation to women in sports.”
Sydney Sweeney’s advertisement has sparked an intense cultural debate about the objectification and sexualization of women in sports. The advertisement received significantly more public attention than any major women athletic tournament, revealing how much attention female athletes get for their bodies, rather than their impressive athletic abilities. Australian swimmer Ariarne Titmus posted on her Instagram story that Sweeney’s ad, and the attention it received, was a “kick in the face” to female athletes everywhere.
While the advertisement was not welcome by most, the discourse it created is. Female athletes everywhere are speaking up about how women in sports deserve to be praised for their athletic prowess, not their bodies.
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