British tennis star Andy Murray has led the backlash against a French DJ who asked a female footballer to twerk after she became the first woman to win the Ballon D'Or yesterday.
Murray took to social media to slam Martin Solveig after he asked Norwegian footballer Ada Hegerberg if she knew how to perform the raunchy dance move - an example of "the ridiculous sexism that still exists in sport".
"Why do women still have to put up with that s***?", the former world No 1 tennis player said on Instagram. "What questions did they ask [Kylian] Mbappe and [Luka] Modric? I'd imagine something to do with football.
"And to everyone who thinks people are overreacting and it was just a joke... It wasn't. I've been involved in sport my whole life and the level of sexism is unreal."
Murray was backed up by English actor Hugh Grant who posted a picture on Twitter of Marie Curie - the first woman to win a Nobel Prize - along with the caption, "but can you twerk?"
Former Football Fern Maia Jackman told 1 NEWS yesterday she was gutted a historic moment in women's football history had been reduced to a sexist remark.
"I think in this moment there needed to be some respect held for the significance of the moment and that Ada made history for the first woman to ever be awarded this award."
Professional Italian club AS Roma called out Solveig as well, crowning the DJ as the new "idiot of the day".
Solveig later apologised for the incident, saying it was a "joke".
"Well, guys I'm a little bit amazed by what I'm reading on the internet.
"I, of course, didn't want to offend anyone," he added."This comes from a distortion of my English culture level, which is obviously not enough because I didn't mean to offend anyone. I didn't know this could be seen as such an offence, especially when you consider the sequence in total when we ended up dancing on Frank Sinatra.
"This was a joke, probably a bad one, and I want to apologise for the one I may have offended. Sorry about that."
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