French DJ Martin Solveig has been widely criticised for asking the winner of the women's Ballon d'Or trophy, Lyon's Ada Hegerberg, if she could twerk on stage.
The host of the prestigious award was quick to apologise after anger on social media.
The DJ said after the show that he was sorry for causing offence.
He said: "I'm a little bit amazed as to what I'm reading on the internet. I, of course, didn't want to offend anyone.
"This comes from a distortion of my English level and my English culture level which is obviously not enough because obviously I didn't mean to offend anyone and I didn't know that this could be seen as such an offence, especially if you consider the sequence in total when we ended up dancing to Frank Sinatra.
"This was a joke, probably a bad one, and I want to apologise for the ones I may have offended. Sorry about that."
Ms Hegerberg said it wasn't a big deal.
She said: "He was really, really sad that it went that way. I didn't think about it at that moment, I didn't consider it as sexual harassment or anything."
- Digital Desk
