Short answers, pulled from the story.
According to A.T. Kearney, a consultancy, the global sporting industry is worth up to 620 billion dollars as of 2013. The world's most accessible and practised sport is running, while association football is the most popular spectator sport.
A sport is a physical activity or game, often competitive and organized, that maintains or improves physical ability and skills. The closest thing to an agreed international definition comes from the Global Association of International Sports Federations, which asks that a sport have competition, harm no living creature, avoid reliance on a single equipment supplier, and contain no deliberately designed luck element.
The International Olympic Committee recognises both chess and bridge as sports. SportAccord recognises five non-physical sports: chess, bridge, draughts, Go and xiangqi, though it caps how many mind games it will admit, and the Council of Europe excludes activities with no physical element.
The word sport comes from the Old French desport, meaning leisure. Its oldest definition in English, from around 1300, was anything humans find amusing or entertaining.
Winning can be decided by objective measures, such as the time to complete a race, or by subjective judging, as in gymnastics and diving. In boxing, three judges independently score each round based on clean punching, effective aggression, ring generalship and defence.
Benito Mussolini used the 1934 FIFA World Cup to showcase Fascist Italy, and Adolf Hitler used the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin to promote Nazi ideology. At the 1972 Munich Olympics, Palestinian militants took Israeli team members hostage and killed 11 athletes in what became known as the Munich massacre.
Women reached full 50 percent parity at the Paris 2024 Olympics after 49 percent at Tokyo 2020, though global surveys report only 20 percent of women versus 31 percent of men take part monthly. In the US, youth sport is a 15 billion dollar industry spanning equipment to private coaching.