It's telling that there are so many women athletes speaking out against this ad campaign. This is not how they want to be viewed, this isn't how they want their sport to be viewed.

Novig and Sweeney are the beneficiaries of the attention, which is similar to the outrage caused by American Eagle’s “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” campaign in 2025. That campaign was heavily criticised for appearing to use the language of eugenics, with Sweeney saying in a now-deleted video: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality, and even eye colour. My jeans are blue.”

Water polo silver medallist Tilly Kearns wrote, “I absolutely fking hate Sydney Sweeney’s new sports ad”, while world champion boxer Skye Nicolson said the backlash was about making a “mockery” of women in sport rather than judging how women look.

“There’s a big difference between looking ‘sexy’ because you do sport compared to use sex to sell ‘sport’,” she wrote in an Instagram story. “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.”