Athletes soiling themselves still more palatable than Sydney Sweeney ad

September 19, 2026 — 5:00am

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Gloves on? Masks fixed? Protective gear? Bomb-proof boots? Great – we’re going into the minefield.

For there has been a weird juxtaposition this week between the commercial portrayal of women’s sport and the sometimes gritty reality.

On the one hand, you’ve got the new Sydney Sweeney ad that shows the American actress dressed up in a variety of sports gear and adopting highly sexualised poses – including sitting legs akimbo atop a basketball hoop – that are only a few postcodes over from soft porn.

Our own Ariarne Titmus effectively tore her a new one for her trouble.

“How do we live in a world where monetising a woman’s body and sexualising women’s sport is still a thing?” she asked on social media. “To take the mickey like this, I thought we were genuinely moving past this bullshit. What is this teaching young men and women of today? Sydney Sweeney, do better.”

And Titmus was not alone. Across the world there was an outcry at this antediluvian portrayal of women’s sport as just an endless series of searingly sexualised scenes, instead of what it is – great sport, full stop!

The Sweeney ad was aimed at luring idiot men, to blow their dough on some gambling app.

And the juxtaposition?

While that was blowing up, images went viral of elite Australian endurance athlete Joanna Wietrzyk continuing to compete in a HYROX event in China – eight one-kilometre runs separated by heavyweight gym workouts – despite appearing to have faecal matter dribbling down the back of her legs.

Wietrzyk has profusely apologised and even foreited her win, but I’m frankly not sure what for – bar, perhaps, having deeply offended Chinese sensibilities. It doesn’t offend mine.

In the extremities of effort in which she found herself, she had an unintended and unfortunate bodily reaction that may well have been olfactory repugnant, but wasn’t remotely morally repugnant. In those extremities of exhaustion, momentarily losing bowel control is no more surprising than fainting. So what is the big deal?

Possible infection of other athletes? Please.

The organisers could see exactly what TV viewers could see, and made no move to pull her out on occupational health and safety grounds.

And what of her decision to continue to victory, regardless? Again, in those extremities, did she even know what was happening behind? I’d say, unlikely. If in the fog of exhaustion she did know and continued anyway, so what?

The great Australian cyclist Sir Hubert Opperman once told me of his actions in a French endurance race in 1928, the Bol D’Or, which measured how far you could ride in 24 hours around a velodrome. To make up for lost time, after his bike had been nobbled, he........

© Brisbane Times