I spent the last week almost completely off the grid near Joshua Tree, with good music, a pool, and more stars than this New York City girl remembers seeing. I made one exception for Ben Shelton’s stunning US Open run that ended in heartbreak. My vacation followed suit with a sleepless red-eye home, but six hours in the air gave me plenty of time to catch up on All The Sports I Missed On Vacation. Like how Breanna Stewart basically adopted Paige Bueckers during Team USA’s Basketball World Cup title run. Or how Caitlin Clark instantly shut down a reporter’s attempt to revive the tired (and false) her-vs.-Angel Reese narrative. Then there were the things I never could’ve predicted: Malala is apparently a “Go Birds” girl. Tom Brady explained a football play with an analogy so absurd his colleagues rightfully raked him over the coals. And new Washington Commanders receiver Stefon Diggs made an early bid for the dumbest penalty of the season. Cardi really did dodge one. Now that I’m caught up (and mildly concerned), let's get to the rest of the headlines.
— Mallory Simon / Writer / New York, NY
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A Very Revealing Sports Bet
What’s going on: Well, it’s been a banner month for sports marketing and women. After Good Good and Callaway’s ad featuring a male golfer shoving a woman to the ground didn’t exactly move the game forward, the sports prediction market Novig gave it a swing. Its new campaign features investor Sydney Sweeney mostly nude, strategically covered by sports equipment, under the slogan “Just Sports.” What could go wrong? Female athletes quickly let them know. Former UCLA gymnast and NCAA champion Gracie Kramer called the ad “honestly infuriating” then answered with a viral reel of her career highlights captioned, “idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like.” Four-time Olympic swimming champion Ariarne Titmus declared the ad “a kick in the face to every woman who had dedicated her life to perfecting her craft” and said that “monetizing a woman’s body and sexualizing women’s sport” is still too common. Novig’s CEO said the company “never intended to portray female sports” and defended the ad as simply Sweeney’s vision of promoting a sports-prediction market.
Trading at an all-time low: You’d think a prediction market could’ve seen this backlash coming. Then again, Novig seems pretty pleased with the attention, so maybe appealing to the “humping lump” demographic, as comedian Michelle Wolf put it, was the goal all along. At a moment when the WNBA and NWSL are expanding, women’s college sports are drawing massive audiences, and new women’s leagues keep attracting investment, Sweeney and Novig somehow reached back for one of advertising’s oldest and grossest plays. If Novig really wanted to hire a female spokesperson to emphasize the platform’s focus on sports, its execs could have considered the constellation of superstar women athletes playing right now, from A’ja Wilson and Paige Bueckers to Trinity Rodman and Naomi Osaka. The actual “Just Sports” content was right there. No strategic football placement required.
“This body helps me make money [and] have fun.” — US Women’s National Team star Alyssa Thompson says this mental trick helps her most when body insecurity hits.
