Sport pertains to any form of competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to the spectator. Sports can be, through casual or organized participation, to improve one's physical health. Hundreds of sports exist, from those between single contestants through to those with hundreds of simultaneous participants, either in teams or competing as individual. In certain sports such as racing, many contestants may compete simultaneously or consecutively, with one winner in others the contest (a match) is between two sides, each attempting to exceed the other. Some sports allow a "tie" or "draw", in which there is no single winner, others provide tie-breaking methods to ensure one winner and one loser. A number of contests may be arranged in a tournament producing a champion many sports leagues make an annual champion by arranging games in a regular sports season, followed in some cases by playoffs.
Sport in childhood. Association football, shown above, is a team sport which also provides opportunities to nurture physical fitness and social interaction skills.
Sport is generally recognized as a system of activities based in physical athleticism or physical dexterity, with major competitions such as the Olympic Games admitting only sports meeting this definition. Other organizations, such as the Council of Europe, preclude activities without a physical element from classification as sports. However, a number of competitive, but non-physical, activities claim recognition as a mind sports. The international Olympic's committee recognizes both chess and bridge as bona fide sports, and sport accord, the international sports federation association, recognizes five non-physical sports: bridge, chess, drafts (checkers), go and Xiangya, and limits the number of mind games which can be admitted as sport.
Sport is usually governed by a set of rules or customs, which serve to ensure fair competition, and allow consistent adjudication of the winner. Winning can be determined by a physical event, such as scoring goals or crossing a line first. It can also be determined by a judge who is scoring elements of the sporting performance, including objective or subjective measures such as technical performance or artistic impression.
Records of performance are often kept, and for popular sports, this information may be widely announced or reported in sport news. Sport is also a major source of entertainment for non-participants, and spectator of sport drawing large crowds to sport venues, and reaching wider audiences through broadcasting. In the sport, sport betting is in some cases severely regulated, and in some cases is central to the sport.
According to a. T. Kearney, a consultancy, the global sporting industry is worth up to $620 billion as of 2013. The world's most accessible and practiced sport is running, while association football is the most popular spectator sport.
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Artifacts and structures suggest sport in China as early as 2000 BC. Gymnastics appears to have been popular in China's ancient past. Monuments to the Pharaohs indicate that a number of sports, including swimming and fishing, were well-developed and regulated several thousands of years ago in Ancient Egypt. Other Egyptian sports included javelin throwing, high jump, and wrestling. Ancient Persian sports such as the traditional Iranian martial art of Zephaniah had a close connection to warfare skills. Among other sports that originated in ancient Persia are polo and jousting.
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A wide range of sports were already established by the time of Ancient Greece and the military culture and the development of sport in Greece influenced one another considerably. Sport became such a prominent part of their culture that the Greeks created the Olympic Games, which in ancient times were held every four years in a small village in the Peloponnese called Olympia.
Sports have been increasingly organized and regulated from the time of the ancient Olympics up to the present century. Industrialization has brought increased leisure time, letting people attend and follow spectator sports and participate in athletic activities. These trends continued with the advent of mass media and global communication. Professionalism became prevalent, further adding to the increase in sport's popularity, as sports fans followed the exploits of professional athletes – all while enjoying the exercise and competition associated with amateur participation in sports. Since the turn of the 21st century, there has been increasing debate about whether transgender sports people should be able to participate in sport events that conform with their post-transition gender identity.
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