Sports romance takes off as Heated Rivalry, Challengers and Off-Campus fuel a steamy new on-screen obsession

Not that we’d ever resort to gender stereotypes of carving out romance and sports as belonging to different domains, but they haven’t always been the most natural of bedfellows.

Sure, plenty of women are super into sport and even more men can come over all Cupid, but there’s something in the air at the moment. There’s been an influx of romance stories set in the rink, on the courtside or next to the track.

The centre of that Venn diagram is expanding, and the sub-genre has become a storytelling powerhouse. It didn’t start with Heated Rivalry, but the Canadian hockey queer romance supercharged it, at least for the screen.

In the past 12 months after Heated Rivalry took over the culture, we’ve had Off Campus (hockey), Crew Girl (rowing) and Finding Her Edge (ice skating) come along.

There are even more on the way, including Throttled (Formula 1), Glory Days (baseball), Gods Of The Game (football), See You At The Finish Line (rowing), Boys of Tommen (rugby), Windy City (hockey, basketball and baseball), Playing The Field (football) and Eventing (equestrian).

When it comes to trends, this is the major leagues, to borrow a metaphor.

Before all that longing and competition heated up the screen, the sub-genre started on the page. Romance fiction sales are booming, up 49 per cent over a three-year period to 2025. In 2024, three million romance books were sold in Australia.

In generations past, bodice rippers may have been a dirty little secret enjoyed at home where no one can see you, but now romance fiction lovers are out in the open — and proud.

Female desire wasn’t something to be hidden like an illicit copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, passed between friends with an obligatory “sshhh”. Morality is elastic and sexual morality evolves.

A large part of that is social media, and especially BookTok which amplified the genre across the internet, bringing existing fans along, and persuading would-be new ones to dip a toe. There were pleasures to be had or, at the very least, pleasures to be read about. And these pleasures are shared by a like-minded community, which creates its own form of intimacy.

Walk into any bookstore – and not just those dedicated to romance fiction, because those shops exist — and you’ll see shelves and tables piled with a plethora of choices.

They all have similar cover art, usually an animated picture featuring a young couple, looking at each other with desire, set against a watercolour-ish backdrop. Sometimes those backgrounds are sports arenas, and the titles are puns such as Icebreaker, Cleat Cute and Check & Mate (ooh, amorous chess play).

It’s also likely not a coincidence that romance fiction has surged at a time when there are reports and studies that young people are having less actual sex – take your pick as to the why, but you can’t discount online interactions replacing physical ones.

Perhaps these relationships are surrogate or illusory, but it’s also what it is.

So, these stories are not an instruction manual which you can map onto real-life romances. They are wish-fulfilment fantasies that appear to be better than the real thing, where the mucky muck of online dating apps offers few favourable comparisons.

That’s the romance genre as a whole, but like romantasy (the sub-genre where romantic stories are crossed over with fantasy aka fairy smut), sports romance offers something extra, a framework that supports and adds to all that yearning.

Sports stories have their tropes and semiotics, and it’s the marriage of the two that have given the sub-genre that extra oomph.

There is also an element of subversiveness in claiming this traditionally male space and injecting romance narratives into it. There’s a certain deliciousness to it.

The tribalism and competition of sport makes for an easy set-up in the age-old enemies-to-lovers romance trope. Heated Rivalry is the classic example of this — it’s literally in the title.

The series was adapted by Jacob Tierney from a book series by Rachel Reid. In the show, the lead characters are Illy and Shane, who face off against each other on the ice, where they’re fierce competitors.

Publicly, they play to win and lightly sledge each other, but they occupy similar physical spaces and are thrust into each other’s orbits. Those charged looks inside the locker room took it to another level, and the portrayal of this romance, starting from a place of sexual chemistry and becoming tender over time, is exactly the stuff fantasies are made of.

The three shows that arrived next are all coded younger, which means that they don’t necessarily have the same audience crossover as Heated Rivalry.

But now there’s a Venn diagram with three circles — young adult, romance and sports — so you add into the mix the wholesomeness of sweet teen crushes.

Crew Girl is about Teagan, a 16-year-old girl who moves to a private school which doesn’t have a girl’s rowing team, so she ends up joining the boys’ crew as the cox.

Being thrown together on the same team gives the story an easy excuse to put Teagan in the same physical space as her prospective paramours, and all that time training towards the same goal (the win!) also puts them on the same side.

The unorthodox arrangement also gives writers the opportunity to distinguish the “good” guys, aka the ones who accept her presence. The show also has a classic love triangle set-up.

Finding Her Edge uses another romance trope — the fake couple. In this instance, it’s an ice dancer and her competitive partner, who decides to put on a show off-the-rink as well to drum up support for a corporate sponsor to save the rink.

Off-Campus’s main focus for the first season is a university music student, Hannah, who becomes entangled with Garrett. Here, again, is a fake couple origin (she’s trying to make someone jealous, he needs her to tutor him), and they begin to fall for each for real.

There’s the added appeal that they come from different worlds — she’s arty and he’s sporty — and that in itself is a long-held fantasy, especially in American young adult fiction where school athletes belong to an upper echelon of the social structure. So, for a music student to “get” a jock is a triumph through which the audience can vicariously live.

Garrett is part of the hockey team, and the following seasons of Off-Campus will shift focus to each of the other core four players.

One of the actors in the series is Australian Josh Heuston and he’s been cast in another sports romance project, Throttled, set in the world of Formula 1. This story is about a forbidden coupling, that between a driver and the sister of his most ardent rival.

Formula 1 is an interesting sport to consider because up until the past decade, it was a sport that was largely popular throughout Europe and South America, where most of the races have traditionally been held.

The market has dramatically expanded more recently to the US, the Middle East and Asia, where sponsors and money have realised the consumerist potential of a truly global competition. It’s also had the added heft of Netflix’s Drive to Survive docuseries, which has brought in a lot of female fans to the sport.

While not in the same basket as the streaming romances, you can look to the 2024 Luca Guadagnino film Challengers as an example of how sport and romance intersect to heighten intensity.

In that movie, there’s a love triangle between three characters who met as junior tennis professionals, played by Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist.

In the original screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes, O’Connor and Faist’s characters, Patrick and Art, vie for the affections of Tashi (Zendaya). But Guadagnino told Kuritzkes that he wanted all three points of the triangle to touch, and it was on.

Challengers is less a swooning romance and more a charged, almost dangerous game of sexual energy, and the best evocation of that is on the court as Patrick and Art face off, the tennis ball smashing back and forth as if something is about to break, all while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s pulsating score thrums.

No one is touching each other, but the way the game plays out is an obvious stand-in for all the pent-up desire between the three characters. It is, in a word, hot.

The commercial side of all those projects can’t be overstated, because popularity begets more popularity, especially in our social media-fuelled cultural milieu.

The core audience for these stories are also women, even for the queer male romances, who enthusiastically share their pop cultural passions on Instagram and TikTok, drumming up hype.

When one thing hits, everyone wants their own version and rushes into production something similar. Heated Rivalry was such a massive deal, no studio or production company could ignore it.

It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as audiences see a higher genre output and think, “Wait, there’s another sports romance, there must be something in it”, and it perpetuates across streaming platforms and, more importantly, on social media.

There is definitely something in it, and it’s only going to get bigger. Over-saturation is always a risk, but no one seems to be tired of true crime yet, so sports romances seems destined to hang around for years to come.