When Serena Williams appeared on the front of a celebrity magazine last week, tennis racket replaced by a weight-loss syringe, she reopened a thorny debate about sport and weight.
Serena Williams’ Weight-Loss Journey Sparks Controversy Over Body Image in Sports
Posted August 24, 2025
The tennis superstar has swapped her racket for a syringe. Other athletes may now follow
The temptation to use GLP-1 drugs to lose weight, and perhaps gain a competitive advantage, is something that is whispered about in changing rooms and on practice grounds, especially in sports where maintaining a low weight is important, such as cycling and horseracing.
Williams posed for People magazine, looking much slimmer than we are used to seeing her, holding a needle in her hand. The tennis star has lost 2st 3lb using weight-loss medication. “After kids, it’s the medicine my body needed,” she says into the camera in her first advert for Ro, a medical company which sells the drug. It may be no coincidence that her husband Alexis Ohanian is on the Ro board.
Such is Williams’s influence, concern may be raised about less famous sportspeople. Paul Struthers, chief executive of the Professional Jockeys Association (PJA), told The Observer he is unaware of any jockeys taking the medication, but is “alive to the possibility that some may be tempted”.
Jockeys have long used quick-fix weight-loss methods before races. “The use of unhealthy ways to make weight is a long-running issue for jockeys, and has certainly been exacerbated by the closure of saunas,” Struthers said.
“Whether it’s the use of hot baths, sweatsuits, sometimes driving with the heat fully up, prolonged periods of self-imposed dehydration, over-exercising all the way through to flipping [self-induced vomiting], it is a matter for great concern.”
The PJA has begun educating its members to avoid GLP-1 drugs, “given the potential risks [they] pose when jockeys are already underweight”. The drugs are not banned by any governing body, but they are being monitored by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Other athletes particularly tempted could be those from aesthetic-based sports who have faced eating disorder challenges in the past, such as gymnastics, according to Claire Heafford, chief executive and co-founder of Gymnasts for Change, a group that campaigns against abuse in gymnastics.
“I’m concerned that a rising use of GLP-1s in sports may result in a reversal of the positive changes we’ve seen in recent years in gymnastics, with women competing at a healthier weight,” Heafford said.
“The history of elite gymnastics is littered with stories of young athletes who were made unwell by their sport, and by coaches who put medals above mental health, so that they became dangerously obsessed with success to the extent that they would have done, and did do, anything to be on top.”
She added: “So many national gymnasts are told to lose weight. It’s always going to be a problem for gymnasts, which is why they might be tempted by weight-loss drugs.”
Heafford has been tempted to try weight-loss medication. “I keep looking at adverts thinking ‘Maybe I could try that’,” she said. “It’s because of my experience in gymnastics, I was told I was fat and I wasn’t, so I have a skewed body image."
Dr Emma Ross, a women’s sport specialist at the Well HQ, shares concerns about aesthetic-based sports. “There is a dark history of doping, and we are probably in a different era now, but it wasn’t long ago we had solid evidence of athletes being doped against their will,” she said. “That worries me about GLP-1s.”
Yet Ross is supportive of GLP-1s in the wider population. “On top of weight loss, they can help with things like cardiovascular health, addiction and psychological issues,” she said. “My main concern is if people use them in an uninformed way. If athletes use them, catching on to ‘I need to be lighter for my sport’, they are just as at risk as anyone for not understanding the balance.”
Heafford believes sports figures have a responsibility. “Williams has basically made an advert to athletes that says it’s safe to take them,” she said.
But a broader problem may affect anyone struggling with body-image issues. “My thinking as someone who is quite vulnerable to these adverts, was: ‘Oh, well Williams is taking it, so it must have been safe’.”
That raises ethical concerns about Williams promoting a drug that may fuel body insecurities – and her husband’s business benefiting from it.
Where does this leave those inspired by champion?
Serena Williams has always stood apart. For two decades, she redefined athleticism and femininity through her power and her unapologetic physicality. It made her an icon for women who didn’t fit the mould of skinny, waifish beauty. That’s why her admission last week that she has turned to a GLP-1 weight-loss medication feels so culturally significant. If one of the strongest women in sport now leans on medication to slim down, what message does that send to the rest of us?
Williams has spoken candidly about the post-pregnancy struggles that led her to start taking the drug. She framed it as a way of regaining functionality, pointing to less joint pain and more energy. But last week’s images were not of her moving freely on the tennis court. They showed her in a fitted dress or a bikini, noticeably thinner. The framing matters. Despite the health narrative, the spectacle is about size, not strength.This was not about health. It was about being skinny.
GLP-1s such as Ozempic and Wegovy were developed to treat diabetes and obesity, and they can deliver undeniable benefits: lower risk of cardiovascular problems, better metabolic health, and reduced inflammation. For many patients, they’re life-changing. But their rise as celebrity lifestyle tools, particularly when the celebrities may profit from their sales, undermines a decade of progress in body positivity.
Williams once embodied resistance to narrow beauty ideals. She was called “too muscular” and “too masculine,” and answered those jeers with her success. By aligning herself now with the aesthetic of slimness, whether she intends to or not, she lends the imprimatur of her legacy to a pharmaceutical culture that equates thin with beautiful.
The wider risk is that GLP-1s accelerate a new hierarchy: those who can afford the injections and emerge slimmer, and those who cannot. It also risks eroding the fragile ground gained by the movement that insisted health and beauty could exist at any size. If Williams, who once made muscles aspirational, trades them for thinness, where does that leave the women who found power in her example?
We don’t know what motivated her to do this advert for a medical company whose board her husband sits on, but the symbolism is public. Williams’s embrace of weight-loss medication reflects the sobering reality that even the strongest among us are not immune to a culture that values thinness above all.
