If a woman won’t even twerk when asked…
Sigh.
Woman wins major sports prize. Man tells her to shake her booty.
What should have been a historic moment in football was ruined when Ada Hegerberg was asked to twerk on stage at the sport’s night of nights in Paris today.
Norwegian Hegerberg, who plays for Olympique Lyonnais in France, won the inaugural Ballon d’Or award for the best female player in the world, beating out 14 other nominees including Australia’s Sam Kerr.
Normally reserved for the men throughout its 62-year history, the 2018 Ballon d’Or finally recognised football’s best women and Hegerberg was rewarded for her outstanding international and club form before the man next to her put a dampener on her big moment.
DJ Martin Solveig, who was a guest host at the awards ceremony, asked the 23-year-old striker to twerk after she received her prize. Hegerberg promptly shut him down, saying “no” and turning her back on him.
While he issued a great braying laugh. I guess we should be grateful he didn’t grab her skirt and yank it over her head?
Absolute trash: French DJ Martin Solveig asks Ada Hegerberg to twerk after receiving the first women's Ballon d'Or award. (Love her response, though.) This is the crap female athletes deal with on a daily basis around the world.pic.twitter.com/y2TLe3v4u9
— Grant Wahl (@GrantWahl) December 3, 2018
Martin Solveig asked Ada Hegerberg to TWERK after she became the first ever person to win the Women’s #Ballondor.
Her reaction is everything. What a disgrace he is. https://t.co/wGC4kZkR2M
— Jessica Dunne (@JessicaTeneal) December 3, 2018
Good on her.
What a bloody idiot. Mind you, where I come from twerk is what your dad said when you asked him where he was going.
Ballon d’or? More like Bellend’or amirite!
DJ Martin Solveig. What a dickhead. He should be given a special award: Dickhead of the Year.
Though on second thoughts, that would be the wrong thing to do, as it would be a gratuitous insult to the dickheads of the world.
“Well done love, now do something sexy”
It’s like having a bucket of cold water dumped on your head. I love that completely flat rejection of the guy’s bullshit. She doesn’t even give him the opportunity to get defensive about it, just leaves him standing there, moronically laughing at himself. It’s probably the only thing she could have done to make him feel anything like the way he just made her feel.
What is a ‘DJ’ doing running the stage for such an event?
Here’s Ada Hegerberg doing Ada Hegeberg things:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2_y_YNz3T0
I’m not defending the comment, which should never have been made.
I think a lot of people didn’t click through though, as there seems to be this notion that she was highly offended and shot him down with an icy “no”, leaving him hanging in embarrassment. As the article says, she wasn’t offended at the time, and the “twerk” comment was apparently an idiotic joke (Solveig claims in part to language confusion) in reference to a dance between Hegerberg and Solveig that took place as planned. Hegerberg said, “I was just happy to do the dance (to Sinatra) and win the Ballon d’Or to be honest.”
It would be nice to have a news story that explains exactly what exactly is going on instead of doing little more than embedding a bunch of outraged tweets. The story to which Ophelia links is the best I’ve seen, but it still doesn’t explain why there even is a dance and why Hegerberg would specifically be dancing with Solveig. Do the winners always dance with a presenter? Is there a tradition of the presenter flirting with the person they’re going to dance with?
All of that seems really stupid to me (why have that garbage when giving awards to athletes?), but it’s clear there’s a context that’s not being explained.
And, yes, again, regardless of the context the “joke” was offensive and should not have been said.
If you click through the link provided by WaM, you’ll see some excellent play – both team and individual. Just don’t read the comments. YouTube is a cesspit.
Skeletor
No one except you has said she was icy. The article says promptly, which is very much the case. her response is instant and abrupt. She does then turn her back on him and only turns back when physically prompted to do so.
Solveig claims it was a joke. Is that any excuse to make a bad sexist joke in such a time and place. He claims language issues, but he was speaking in his native tongue, apart from ‘twerk’. If he wanted to dance, there are French words he could have used. I’ll go with the fact it was a sexist ‘joke’ and he was in fact kinda hoping that the sexy athlete would in fact twerk at his request. I thought Hegerberg simply tried to downplay the incident as best she could afterwards, not wanting her big moment to become a shit fight that would do her as much damage, if not more, than anyone else. After all, just 18 hours ago someone left this lovely comment on WaM’s linked video…
[1] This was answering a previous comment deploring the state of women’s football.
Other than that I agree with you. The format of the presentation with a DJ as presenter, dancing and a twerking joke was variously strange, jarring and unacceptable.