I have scrolled past a great many beach photos in this job, and most of them make the same point: sun, sea, swimsuit. Olivia Ponton’s feed is a little different, because the person in the swimsuit has started saying out loud what that kind of feed can cost. When we first wrote about her, in October 2022, she was a 20-year-old TikTok star with a fresh Sports Illustrated Swimsuit debut. She is 24 now (born May 30, 2002, in Naples, Florida). She is signed to IMG Models, she hosts a podcast about books, and since December 2024 a lot of people know her name from a police report. And this week she posted the most important video she has made.
The beach looks that started it
The post that first caught our eye in 2022 was a beach series with her sister, captioned with the hashtag #twins4ever. In it Ponton wore a swimsuit with long decorative ties wrapped around the waist, shot at sunset. It was a good photo, and it was also the template for her whole feed: swimwear, gym clips, backstage shots, mirror selfies, posted almost daily.
My read is that the template worked because it never pretended to be anything else. Ponton started posting workout videos to TikTok in 2020, right after high school, and spent about three months that year living in the Hype House (a content house, for the lucky few who missed that era). She had already signed with Wilhelmina Models in her senior year. These days she is with IMG Models.
From Montenegro to Dominica: the SI Swimsuit years
Ponton was a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit rookie in 2022, photographed by James Macari in Montenegro. A year later she was back, shot by Amanda Pratt in Dominica in a run of very bold, very beaded two-pieces. She has also walked the SI Swimsuit runway in Miami.
What strikes me is how quickly she turned “TikTok girl” into a real modeling career. Plenty of creators get one glossy shoot. Getting asked back the next year is the real test, and she passed it.
The Joe Burrow chapter
On December 9, 2024, while Joe Burrow was playing Monday Night Football against the Cowboys in Dallas, his house in Anderson Township, Ohio, was broken into. The Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office report said Ponton arrived at the house and found a smashed bedroom window and a ransacked room. She called her mother, Diane Ponton, and her mother called 911. The report listed Olivia as a 22-year-old employed by Burrow, which may be the least romantic way two people have ever been linked in public.
At his next press conference Burrow said: “I feel like my privacy has been violated in more ways than one.” Since then the two have been seen at the Fanatics Flag Football Classic in Los Angeles in March 2025, at the Miami Grand Prix that May, and on nights out in Los Angeles and New York. Neither has confirmed the relationship. Honestly, I respect that. After the year they had, keeping one thing private seems fair.
What she said this week
Here the tone of this page changes, because hers did. In a TikTok posted after a workout clip about “training like an angel,” Ponton said she has “struggled with many, many, many forms of eating disorders, specifically anorexia,” and wanted to talk about it. Her message was that “being anorexic, nine times out of 10, is not going to give you the body that you’re craving, nor desiring.” About the worst of it she said: “I have never looked worse.” About now: “I have never felt better, and I’ve never looked better.” She added that the “nine out of 10” was about her own experience, not a claim about everyone who has an eating disorder.
This isn’t the first time she has talked about it. On Emily Ratajkowski’s High Low with EmRata podcast in 2023, she said: “I never had an eating disorder before I had social media,” and linked it to the attention her bikini photos got.
I think this matters more than any campaign she has shot. A swimsuit model is the person the internet assumes has no reason to struggle, and she has now said, twice and on the record, that the feed and the struggle lived side by side.
The gym video above, a 2022 training session on Bradley Martyn’s channel, reads differently now. It is still about strength. It just isn’t the whole story anymore.
My take
In 2022 we wrote that the Ponton story was a swimsuit worth seeing at sunset. In 2026 it’s a model using the same feed to say what the swimsuit photos left out. The beach looks are still there. What has changed is that she is the one telling you how to read them. You can follow her on Instagram at @olivia.ponton and on TikTok at @iamoliviaponton.
If you or someone close to you is struggling with eating, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline in the US is 1-866-662-1235.
Sources
- Olivia Ponton on Instagram: Verity premiere, October 2026
- Olivia Ponton on Instagram
- Olivia Ponton on TikTok
- EssentiallySports: Olivia Ponton opens up about her eating disorder (Oct. 12, 2026)
- AOL: Ponton on High Low with EmRata (2023)
- Gray News: Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office on the Burrow break-in
- CNN: Burrow’s house broken into during Monday Night Football
- Sports Illustrated: Who is Joe Burrow dating (July 2026)
- SI Swimsuit: Ponton’s debut in Montenegro
- SI Swimsuit: Ponton in Dominica
- Wikipedia: Olivia Ponton
