Athletes Put Real Sport Back After Sweeney’s Novig Ad

Amy Hunt ran a season’s best 22.10 seconds for fourth in Budapest on Sunday, then told Sydney Sweeney what women in sport look like.

The line was aimed at Novig’s Just Sports advert, a nude campaign for a U.S. prediction market in which Sweeney is an equity holder.

Footballs, Hockey Pads and a Prediction Market

Novig dropped the spot on 9 September, the Wednesday the new NFL season opened, and billed it as the company’s first national Just Sports campaign. In the film the 29-year-old actress, known for Euphoria, Anyone But You and The Housemaid, covers herself with American footballs, a basketball, hockey pads, a tennis racket and a baseball bat. She sits on a hoop. She lies on a pool table.

“Think you know sports? Prove it,” she says, holding two footballs. “Novig is just sports. So they wanted to show just sports.” Later she adds, “No betting on wars or deaths and no politics. Just you, your takes and sports.” On the pool table she says, “You can’t trade this. I just look good here.”

The company posted the film with a one-line joke.

Confirmed: Sydney Sweeney knows ball. pic.twitter.com/EXQ4PzVZsi

— Novig (@Novig) September 9, 2026

That is the product pitch wearing a body. Novig is not a high-street bookmaker. It is a sports-only prediction market, launched nationwide in August under federal rules, that lets adults trade contracts on sporting outcomes. Rivals such as Kalshi and Polymarket also list politics and other events. Novig’s whole argument is that it does not.

The pictures do the opposite of the slogan. Sport is present as props. No athlete is on screen. By 14 September the campaign had passed more than 40 million views, and a firm few sports fans could have named in August was suddenly in the same conversation as its larger rivals.

Amy Hunt Pointed the Camera at 21.47

Hunt had just come off the track at the first World Athletics Ultimate Championship when she said Sweeney’s name. Melissa Jefferson-Wooden had just run 21.47 to take the Budapest 200m, a personal best that moved her to third on the world all-time list. Only Florence Griffith-Joyner’s 21.34 and Shericka Jackson’s 21.41 and 21.45 stand ahead of that clocking, so the time sits as the fourth-fastest ever run. Gabby Thomas, the Olympic champion, was second in 21.77. Kayla White made it a United States 1-2-3 in 21.93.

Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like. 21.4. Muscles. Hard work, blood, sweat, tears. This is a beautiful evening.

Amy Hunt, British sprinter, to BBC Sport in Budapest

Hunt, a four-time European champion from this summer’s championships, did not stop at the time. “When you’re a woman in sport, it’s not pretty. It’s not glamorous. It’s not sexy all the time, definitely,” she said. She added that her period had started the day before the meeting, “so that’s not really ideal, and that’s not ever what you try to really plan for.”

THE BUDAPEST 200M FINAL

Jefferson-Wooden had already won the 100m in a world-leading 10.62 the night before. Hunt’s 22.10 was a season’s best and still left her off the podium. The mixed zone, not a moodboard, was the picture she wanted Sweeney to see.

The Reels That Put Training Back in Frame

The reply did not start in Budapest. On 11 September, American gymnast Gracie Kramer posted a training montage with the caption, “I don’t know what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what women in sport look like.” She later told the BBC World Service’s Newshour she had not expected the reaction and “just wanted to uplift women and remind them that you may see these types of ads but remember that this is not the only thing that matters.”

Kramer competes in a leotard and said she is used to “very demeaning and objectifying” messages from men. “Unfortunately being objectified pretty much my entire career, it made me feel strong enough to post about this and to stand up for the women that don’t want to be objectified and don’t want to be looped into this unfortunate narrative that’s been pushed for a long time,” she said.

From there the template spread across sports that rarely share a feed.

ATHLETES WHO PUT THEIR OWN TAPE UP

• Ariarne Titmus: Australia’s four-time Olympic swimming champion called the advert “a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft.”
• Sophie Capewell: The British Olympic cycling champion asked why that face, rather than an athlete, was the one tied to sport.
• Tilly Kearns: The Australian water polo Olympian posted pool and team footage and said she hated the advert.
• Skye Nicolson: The world champion boxer wrote that there is “a big difference between looking ‘sexy’ because you do sport compared to using sex to sell ‘sport’,” and that the outrage was “giving the ad campaign exactly what they wanted.”
• Felicity Palmateer: The Australian surfer called the film “very damaging, especially for young females getting into sport.”
• Alex Matthews: The England rugby forward, a Great Britain sevens player at Tokyo 2020, said a campaign like this should not teach girls there is a “one size fits all” body, because “especially in rugby, you wouldn’t have a team.”

Lisa Neumann, Ellie Boatman and independent MP Zali Steggall, Australia’s most successful alpine skier, joined them. Steggall called the film “incredibly disappointing and just offensive,” and said it “uses a woman’s body to sell sports betting while reducing women’s sport to a sexualised punchline.” She also spoke past the athletes, to the young men the industry already chases through sport.

Capewell put the objection in one sentence that cuts through the hypocrisy argument still circulating around the clip. “It’s not necessarily that people are upset with someone having autonomy, it’s the fact that that seems to be the only narrative that is directed around women in sports, or that’s what gets more popularity,” she told BBC Sport.

Why Sweeney Posted ESPN Body Issue Covers

Sweeney has not issued a statement to the athletes. On Sunday she posted ESPN Body Issue images of Serena Williams, Ronda Rousey, Myles Garrett and Karl-Anthony Towns, a silent comparison that treats a magazine shoot of working athletes as the same object as a gambling launch.

They are not the same job. The Body Issue is athletes presenting bodies they built for their events, under their own names. The Novig film is a Hollywood partner, who does not compete, selling a platform that takes money on other people’s results. Matthews’s point about rugby squads sits in that gap: the Olympic village she described was full of older, younger, taller and heavier athletes who were “all the best at what they did.”

How do we live in a world where monetising a woman’s body and sexualising women’s sport is still a thing?

Ariarne Titmus, four-time Olympic swimming champion, on Instagram

The loud public split still pretends the fight is about whether a woman may be naked on camera. Plenty of replies to the coverage ran that way, lining the advert up with OnlyFans, pride marches and every other nude image in the culture, then calling the athletes inconsistent. That dodge skips the buyer. A prediction-market launch timed for NFL week one is not a Body Issue. It is customer acquisition, aimed at the men who already make up most of that market, using a famous body as the bait.

Nicolson saw the trap inside the reply videos themselves. Every share of the original film, even as a hate-watch, still moves Novig’s product. The athletes posted anyway, because leaving the nude clip as the week’s picture of women and sport was worse.

Sweeney Helped Write the Line and Took Equity

The forgotten party in the row is the cap table. Sweeney did not turn up as a rented face. Jacob Fortinsky, Novig’s co-founder and chief executive, said she approached the company “interested in some kind of equity partnership,” and that the firm is “very excited to have her on the cap table.” He would not give her stake or what she was paid to appear. She also joins as a strategic partner.

In Novig’s own release she called the work “a fun idea” whose concept was to “cut through the noise and put the focus entirely on sports,” brought to life “with confidence, humor and a playful edge.” She later said she was “part of the creative conversations from the very beginning,” that she does not “like to just put my face on something,” and that she “believed in him as a founder.” Fortinsky said she helped craft the line he had already used: “No wars. No death. No politics. Just sports.” He also said she was “uncomfortable” with some markets other platforms offer.

The moral contrast is the whole brand. Novig requires users to be 21 or older. Fortinsky noted that Kalshi and Polymarket admit people from 18, and he defended the racy cut by saying “trading is for adults.” The same week, Polymarket circulated a celebrity film stuffed with athletes and famous names horsing around in an office, among them LeBron James, Derek Jeter and Eli Manning. Novig spent its football-season budget on one star with no kit on.

WHAT NOVIG PUT ON THE TABLE

• The partner: Sweeney holds equity and helped shape the “just sports” line, rather than collecting a simple endorsement fee.
• The rulebook: Ludlow Exchange, LLC, the New York vehicle that does business as Novig, received a CFTC order of designation as a contract market on 16 June 2026, recorded on the Ludlow Exchange contract-market filing.
• The chequebook: The company, founded in 2021 by Fortinsky and Kelechi Ukah, has raised more than $100 million and had already tried smaller sports tie-ups, including the New York Mets and a short LIV Golf window.
• The ask: Fortinsky said this was “a very concentrated bet” on how Novig would spend the bulk of its marketing money going into football season.

He was blunt about why Sweeney was the spend.

Sydney is great at captivating audiences and being the center of attention. In some sense, it forces us into the national discourse.

Jacob Fortinsky, co-founder and CEO of Novig

In July he had said he was optimistic that within a year Novig would be among the first names people think of when they hear “prediction markets.” He did not need the year. The discourse arrived in five days, carried by the same people who cannot stand the pictures.

The Campaign Still Has Spots This Fall

Novig says the work will run across digital, social, online video and out-of-home through the football season, with more creative still to come, including a “responsible trading” spot. The athletes’ weekend of unpaid labour will not pull those bookings. It will sit underneath them, as a second film the company did not have to shoot.

THE WEEK THE SLOGAN MET THE TRACK

1. 9 September 2026: Novig posts the Just Sports film and names Sweeney a strategic partner and equity holder.
2. 11 September 2026: Kramer posts the first widely copied “this is what a woman in sports looks like” reel.
3. 13 September 2026: Hunt answers Sweeney from the Budapest mixed zone after 22.10; Sweeney posts ESPN Body Issue images and no statement.
4. 14 September 2026: Titmus, Capewell, Palmateer, Steggall and others are in the same argument; the campaign’s view tally is over 40 million.

Last year Sweeney’s American Eagle jeans work, built on the pun “great jeans,” set off its own fight over race and beauty. She later said she had been surprised. The Novig film repeats the method: a simple line, a body, a product, and a decision not to meet the people who do the thing being sold.

Hunt closed her interview thinking about the next few years on the same track, “in them situations where I’m in a central lane and really fighting for my life.” Jefferson-Wooden, still stunned by 21.47, said she had not seen that number coming. Those are the sentences the Just Sports campaign did not film. The platform that wanted only sport got the argument instead, and its chief executive had already said that was the point.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on an advertising campaign and the public response to it, and it is for information only. It is not betting advice, investment advice or a recommendation to use prediction markets, sportsbooks or any other gambling product. Anyone considering staking money on sporting or other event contracts should read the operator’s own terms and, where needed, speak to a qualified financial or gambling-support professional licensed in their country. View counts, ownership details, campaign plans and sporting results are those given by the named companies, officials and results services on the dates cited, and they can change.