The recent advertisement for the sports betting app, Novig, really struck a nerve. The minute-long ad features Sydney Sweeney nude, posing with sports equipment, with the tagline “Novig is just sports.” Contrary to Novig’s messaging, a decade in competitive athletics has made it abundantly clear to me that sports’ impact on girls and women is anything but “just sport.”
This frustration isn’t about Sweeney or a single ad. This is about how we’ve built a society where women grow up learning that their appearance is what draws attention. And attention shapes what is valued. Ads like this work, but it’s worth considering how and why we have normalized using the sexualization of women as a selling point, and in this case, doing it at the expense of female athletes to pull a predominantly male audience.
Girls and women today are constantly tasked with figuring out our own health and performance goals amid a lack of attention to and research on female physiology in sports. Not only do we lack information, but we are also bombarded by a social media landscape that profits from ever-changing body ideals and a rise of GLP-1s.
The societal aversion to female strength and power, and emphasis instead on objectification, is harmful not just to women, but also to men and to how we relate to one another as a collective. If strength and femininity become mutually exclusive, then men are boxed into strength, dominance and emotional restraint. The same narrative that makes women question where their worth lies also diminishes the complexity of what it means to be a man.
I am grateful and lucky to have been raised by a mother who embodies strength in every sense of the word, and whose athletic capacity I have looked up to my whole life. My own journey in sports has profoundly shaped who I am. It has given me discipline, a strong sense of self and confidence in my body and its abilities. Beyond that, it has led me to the memories, peers and mentors for whom I have infinite appreciation.
And yet, despite the moments of profound joy I’ve experienced, the narrative around women in sports still affects me constantly. I’ve frequently been catcalled on runs and told that men would be intimidated by, or unattracted to, a woman who was “more visibly muscular than them.” Even older members of my family have contributed to the harmful rhetoric, telling me that they were “so glad my success in running hadn’t changed my body too much.”
This isn’t just my experience: My friends and teammates have endless similar stories. Together, these individual stories reflect larger societal values: It feels like a female athlete’s accomplishments cannot be celebrated separately from how she looks as she achieves them.
Women have spent ages fighting for the participation and respect in sports we deserve. There are signs of progress: Female participation in sports is consistently increasing, motivating me to pour energy into the field. That said, the discrepancies continue to leave me baffled.
Title IX was signed into law in 1972. Before that, 294,015 girls participated in U.S. high school sports, compared with 3.7 million boys. While Title IX reduced this disparity significantly, girls still have roughly 1.3 million fewer opportunities to play high school sports than boys in the United States today. Women competed for the first time in the 1900 Olympic Games, representing approximately 2 percent of athletes; there was a 50-to-50 ratio in Paris 2024, but still, only 13% of coaches there were women.
Women’s sports media coverage has tripled since 2019, rising from about 5% to over 15% today — which still leaves over 80% of coverage focused on men’s sports.
This problem goes beyond participation. It’s also about how audiences receive and celebrate this participation — or don’t. It’s also about how girls are taught to view themselves and others.
I have noticed a trend of real improvement in education for female athletes on topics such as adequate fueling, Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S), and proper training for sustainable health. Besides education, there are encouraging examples of shifting norms in movements like “Everyone Watches Women’s Sports,” new WNBA teams such as the Portland Fire and others.
Yet we are also taking steps backward. The resurgence of model-skinny beauty standards online, amplified by the increasing use of GLP-1s — which alter hormonal regulation of glucose, insulin and glucagon, ultimately reducing perception of hunger — threatens to derail much of the work done to uplift young athletes. Initially approved for those with diabetes, GLP-1s are now widely used for general weight loss and promoted by world-renowned female athletes such as Serena Williams. Despite framing her Ro treatment around postpartum and knee stress, her use of chemical weight loss has the capacity to undercut her otherwise positive influence over millions of young girls.
In partnership with Wildwood Running — a nonprofit dedicated to educating female athletes and coaches — I recently put together a report, which has yet to be published, with survey results from hundreds of high school female runners who participated in our clinics across the country. The statistics captured a paradox I feel frequently: shocked and angered, yet not surprised.
Based on our results, 71% of girls feel concerned about their body image; 67% say their mental health suffers in and around sport; 85% feel overwhelmed by comparison in sport and 43% have restricted their food.
The key challenges female athletes face are twofold: a gap in both knowledge and social narrative. Our efforts must address the two simultaneously.
We need more focused research: Only 6% of sports science studies are exclusively on female athletes. Societally, we are battling norms exemplified by advertisements that use women’s sports as a backdrop for male objectification as well as health platforms that treat the female body as something to be optimized for appearance rather than performance.
This advertisement made me incredibly frustrated. And at the same time, I get it; it worked. But I hope it has been effective not just at drawing people to Novig’s platform, but also at sparking thoughts on why, and opening a broader conversation around women in sports. Culturally and medically, women should be wholeheartedly supported in pushing the boundaries of human excellence.
Eva Novy-Hildesley PZ ’27 is a member of the Pomona-Pitzer (P-P) women’s track and cross country teams and hopes to study how female physiology uniquely impacts performance and recovery in elite athletics.
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