Sydney Sweeney Novig advert sparks social-media culture war over sport and sexiness
On 18 September 2026, a 40-second Novig advert featuring Sydney Sweeney set off a culture-war backlash across social media this week, the clip becoming unavoidable online. The advert, promoted as showing “a woman in sport actually looks like”, has dominated feeds and renewed debate about the portrayal of women in sport.
The video opens with a sequence of deliberately passive-aggressive captions — “Dear Sydney”, “Hey Sydney”, “Respectfully Sydney” — and cuts between images of its subject on a treadmill, racing down the back straight, tackling or delivering a roundhouse kick, lifting weights and throwing herself through the air. It is soundtracked by Dua Lipa, and the piece’s ubiquity has, the writer notes, driven additional attention for Training Season. The writer also compares its algorithmic dominance to a pop-culture simile earlier in the piece.
The immediate backlash to the Novig advert produced a wave of montages and reaction clips, with grassroots and elite athletes posting their own reels; some commentators described it as a boost for women’s sport this week, “unless, you know, they’re the European Solheim Cup team.” The spread of athlete highlights contrasted with the attention diverted from on-pitch and court events.
The noisy reaction, the writer argues, illustrates solidarity within women’s sport: historically, female athletes either ignored demeaning situations to continue their careers or risked speaking out to face indifference or scorn. The piece states that today those voices are louder and more likely to be taken seriously, a shift that underpins much of the contemporary response to the advert.
The author warns against treating every deliberate provocation as a national crisis, suggesting that the focus on an American celebrity has displaced discussion of matches such as Lottie Woad’s singles match in the Netherlands and Chelsea’s 5-0 demolition of Manchester United in the WSL. The column notes, with irony, that Sweeney “hasn’t even invested in a Premier League club yet,” underscoring the discrepancy between celebrity attention and sporting coverage.
The column reiterates that sport is about effort, sweat and inclusivity but contends that it also invites admiration for the human body as a functional, athletic specimen — citing the “bulging neck on the rugby pitch” and the “rock-hard calves on the marathon runner” as examples. Named sporting figures used as exemplars in the piece include Rafael Nadal’s arms, Jessica Ennis-Hill’s abs and Serena Williams’s everything.
On the question of sexuality, the writer accepts that “sometimes, when those attributes are in motion, sport can be sexy,” while rejecting the sexualised presentation offered by the Sweeney advert as misleading: “Not in the ball-cradling way that Sydney Sweeney’s performance allows delusional men to believe.” The column also quotes Amy Hunt’s response that being an athlete is “not sexy all the time” and notes that the second viral clip this week showed a Hyrox competitor soiling herself as she powered to victory.
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