Yesterday, my social media feed looked different.
One after another, female athletes from around the world were posting themselves running, swimming, lifting, competing, sweating, falling, winning and training.
Their message was simple:
This is what a woman in sport looks like.
The posts came in response to the new Sydney Sweeney campaign for Novig, a sports prediction platform in which Sweeney is also an investor. The campaign uses highly sexualized images of Sweeney surrounded by sporting equipment, and the reaction from female athletes has quickly spread around the world.
Athletes including former American gymnast Gracie Kramer, British sprinter Amy Hunt, Olympic cyclist Sophie Capewell and Australian Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus have spoken publicly about the campaign. Other athletes have responded in perhaps an even more powerful way. They are simply showing what women in sport actually look like: training, competing, sweating, celebrating, losing, winning and doing the work.
The conversation immediately became about sexualization and representation. And those are important conversations.
But watching it unfold, I kept thinking:
We are missing something even bigger:
The problem is not Sydney Sweeney. Sydney Sweeney is a beautiful woman.
That is not the problem.
Women are allowed to be sexy. Athletes are allowed to be sexy. Women are allowed to pose nude, wear bikinis, wear makeup, love fashion, hate fashion, lift heavy weights, surf enormous waves or do absolutely none of those things.
Empowerment cannot mean replacing one set of rules for women with another.
The question is not whether Sydney Sweeney should be allowed to show her body.
Of course she should.
The question is:
What are we using that image to sell?
And who is receiving the message?
Because advertising does not exist in a vacuum.
When you combine a hypersexualized image of a woman, the visual language of sport and a product connected to sports wagering, you are communicating several things at the same time, even if the campaign says it is "just sports."
And children are watching too.
What are we teaching the girls?
Imagine being an 11 year old girl who loves sports.
You train four days a week. Your legs are strong. Your shoulders are getting bigger. Your hair looks terrible after practice. Your face turns red when you run. You have bruises. You sweat. You fail. You try again.
Then you open your phone.
And once again, the image associated with a woman and sports is not about what her body can do.
It is about how desirable her body can be.
That distinction matters.
Girls already grow up surrounded by messages about what their bodies should look like. Sport has the extraordinary ability to offer another relationship with the body.
A body becomes something that carries you, jumps, fights, runs, surfs, scores, falls and gets back up.
Sport can teach a girl to look at her legs and think:
Power.
Instead of: Are they skinny enough? That is an enormous shift.
And we should protect it.
But what are we teaching the boys?
This is the part of the conversation I think we discuss far too little.
Yesterday, I saw women posting incredible athletic performances in response to the campaign.
This morning, I saw another side of the story.
An Australian national level triathlete shared some of the messages she had received from men after speaking about the controversy.
The comments were not debating advertising strategy. They were attacking her appearance. She was being called jealous and ugly. People suggested she was criticizing the campaign because she was not as attractive as Sydney Sweeney and could never be chosen for an advertisement like hers.
And suddenly the entire conversation became painfully clear.
A woman was essentially saying:
Please see women in sport for what they can do.
And some men responded:
But are you attractive enough?
That is exactly the problem.
We cannot talk about the messages we are giving young girls without talking about the messages we are giving young boys.
If boys repeatedly see women positioned around sport primarily as objects of attraction, what are we teaching them about female athletes? What are we teaching them about women, masculinity and what deserves respect?
Those boys will become teammates, coaches, managers, husbands, fathers, executives and consumers.
Representation educates everyone.
And then there is the thing we are actually selling
There is another layer here that deserves attention.
This is not an advertisement for running shoes.
It is an advertisement for a sports prediction platform.
And this is where we need to look beyond opinions and into the research.
The World Health Organization identifies gambling as a public health concern and specifically warns that the heavy promotion of gambling online and through sport creates a risk of normalizing gambling among children and young people. The WHO also notes that gambling harm does not affect only the person gambling. Financial hardship can affect household spending, housing, health, education and family relationships. According to the WHO, for every person gambling at high risk levels, an average of six other people are affected. [World Health Organization, Gambling Fact Sheet]
The evidence around advertising is also becoming increasingly clear. A 2025 systematic review published in Addiction examined 22 studies of sports related gambling advertising. Researchers found that exposure was associated with increases in gambling frequency, gambling expenditure, unplanned gambling, likelihood of gambling and, in some cases, the complexity or riskiness of bets. The authors also found that the effects may be stronger among people already at higher risk of gambling harm. [McGrane et al., 2025, Addiction, University of Sheffield]
Research specifically involving younger populations raises additional concerns. A systematic review examining gambling advertising and adolescents and young adults found that exposure and recall of gambling advertising were associated with gambling intentions, behaviors and gambling related problems. The researchers also identified sporting events, television and social media as significant environments for this exposure. [Anales de Psicología, Systematic Review of Gambling Advertising Exposure in Adolescents and Youth]
So think about the combination.
Sex, sport, celebrity, betting and social media, packaged into something provocative enough to travel around the world in hours.
From a marketing perspective, I understand exactly why.
Attention is currency. Controversy generates attention. Sex generates attention. Celebrity generates attention.
But as marketers, founders, parents and adults, perhaps we need to start asking a different question.
Not:
Did it work?
But:
What did it teach?
Because millions of impressions can make a campaign successful on a dashboard while still leaving something damaging behind.
At NOGG, we made this decision before we ever needed it
When we created the NOGG Athletes program, we put something very intentionally into our agreements.
No adultization. No sexualization.
Our athletes are girls.
Some are very young girls.
And as NOGG grows with them, we want there to be absolutely no ambiguity about how we will tell their stories.
We will celebrate their strength, discipline, courage, competitiveness, personality, failures, victories, muddy knees, bruises, surfboards, gis, skis, soccer cleats, muscles and dreams.
We do not need to turn girls into miniature adults to make them interesting.
And we do not need to make female athletes fragile to make them beautiful.
Strong is beautiful
This is something I want every NOGG girl to understand.
You do not have to make yourself smaller to be feminine. You do not have to hide your muscles. You do not have to pretend you are not competitive. You do not have to apologize for wanting to win. You do not have to be delicate to be beautiful.
Beauty can be strength. Beauty can be bravery. Beauty can be discipline.
Beauty can be the face you make during the last 100 meters when everything hurts and you refuse to stop. Beauty can be getting thrown onto a jiu jitsu mat and standing back up. Beauty can be paddling into a wave that scares you. Beauty can be losing a championship and returning to practice on Monday.
And yes, beauty can also be a beautiful dress, makeup and femininity.
Girls should not have to choose.
That is the point.
Maybe the athletes responding online have already created the better campaign
There is something powerful happening on social media right now.
Female athletes are not asking anyone to imagine an alternative. They are showing it. They are posting races, training sessions, medals, falls, sweat, muscles, friendships, teams and work.
Thousands of images answering one simple question:
What does a woman in sport look like?
She looks like all of them. And perhaps that is what our girls and our boys need to see more often. Not because women should not be sexy. Not because beauty is wrong. But because a woman's body can tell a much bigger story than whether someone wants to look at it.
At NOGG, that is the story we choose to tell.
What can she do? What can she overcome? How brave can she become?
That is the image of women in sport I want our girls to grow up seeing. And just as importantly, it is the image I want our boys to grow up respecting.
Strong is beautiful. Brave is beautiful. Fierce is beautiful.
And none of it needs permission.
