Have you seen the 40-second video that will change the way you think about women’s sport, women’s bodies, just, you know, women? It’s been unavoidable on social media this week – brazen, unapologetic, dominating the algorithm like an AI kitten hacking a banana-bread recipe while lip-syncing to Cardi B. I for one have enjoyed it at least 50 times already.

It starts with some carefully curated passive-aggression – “Dear Sydney”, “Hey Sydney”, “Respectfully Sydney” – and follows up with clips of what, in its own words, “a woman in sport actually looks like”. It shows its subject pounding the treadmill or powering down the back straight, flooring a rival with a tackle or a roundhouse kick, lifting weights or throwing herself through the air. It is, inevitably, soundtracked by Dua Lipa. Training Season is getting a serious bump this week.

The almighty backlash to the Novig advert that everyone would rather not have talked about at all has generated more montages than we’ve seen since Rocky IV. My own feed is swamped with inspo-insta reels from grassroots and elite athletes alike. Some might argue it’s the best thing to happen to women’s sport this week – unless, you know, they’re the European Solheim Cup team. Either way, a positively cartoonish piece of provocation lit the five-second fuse to the powder-keg stamped CULTURE WAR, and the resultant explosion has enveloped us all in its cloud of colourful outrage and content confetti.

The noisy reaction to an actor posing almost naked with various items of sporting equipment demonstrates the power and importance of solidarity within women’s sport. For decades, being a woman in an incorrigibly sexist sector left you one of two responses. Either you ignored uncomfortable and demeaning situations so you could just get on with the thing you wanted to be doing, or you spoke out, braving either devastating indifference or a cacophony of scorn. These days, we’re privileged to have a far louder voice, and for it to be taken seriously.

There is, however, a danger in taking every piece of deliberate provocation too seriously. And the danger is that it robs us of some of the delight of the thing we love in the first place. Instead of spending this week talking about Lottie Woad’s singles match in the Netherlands, or Chelsea’s 5-0 demolition of Manchester United in the WSL, we’ve surrendered billboards’ worth of brain space to an American celebrity who hasn’t even invested in a Premier League club yet.

Personally I have also, as discussed, spent quite a lot of time scrolling other people’s highlights reels, and I won’t lie that they got me pretty pumped, but then that was very much their goal. From spiralling gymnastic tumbles to grunting deadlifts, all these women look fire. Even a unitedly earnest effort to remind us that sport is about effort and sweat and inclusivity can’t and shouldn’t hide the fact that it’s also, thrillingly, about human bodies and the gloriously impressive things they can be honed to do.

Having to argue that sportswomen aren’t sexual objects, on the other hand, feels as dated as the advert. Part of the problem of the ad is its almost comically regressive throwback to the era of Page 3 girls and 1980s erotica – the kind of aesthetic we now knowingly indulge within the safe confines of a Jilly Cooper TV adaptation. If we’re jumping this far back in the timeline, will we have to revisit, too, whether it’s appropriate to wear make-up on track, or skorts on court, or any other of the subsidiary arguments that determine how sexy or not a female athlete is required – or allowed – to be?

Or can we unclench and leave them in the past where they belong? Might we even skip a bit further into a more confident future and say out loud the thing that we have always had to be extremely careful expressing? Which is that sport is a primarily physical pursuit that tends to turn the people at its apex into magnificent specimens of humanity. And that those aesthetics are a part of what makes it appealing in the first place.

The bulging neck on the rugby pitch and the rock-hard calves on the marathon runner have a functional purpose, as opposed to the fantasy one that prompts today’s Hollywood actors to get superhero-buff. But that doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to admire them. Sport is an environment that invites us to witness and thrill to the power and grace of the human body. It’s not only our tribal allegiances and the dopamine hit of vicarious victory that we’re indulging when we marvel at our sporting heroes: it’s also our appreciation of their physical attributes, whether that’s Rafael Nadal’s arms or Jessica Ennis-Hill’s abs or Serena Williams’s everything.

And sometimes, when those attributes are in motion, sport can be sexy. Not in the ball-cradling way that Sydney Sweeney’s performance allows delusional men to believe. But in a way that nevertheless holds hostage to the eye and makes the pulse race. It’s rather absurd – and a little self-deluding – for sports fans to pretend either to ourselves or others that we don’t find some of our heroes pretty attractive.

And no, as Amy Hunt so properly pointed out in her own clapback to the Sweeney ad, being an athlete is “not sexy all the time”. If anyone needed proof, the second most notorious viral video of this week was, in fact, a Hyrox competitor soiling herself as she powered to victory. There has, in other words, been plenty of crap circulating on the internet this week. The sanest choice is to avert our eyes.

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