Contact sport

A contact sport is any sport where physical contact between competitors, or their environment, is an integral part of the game. For example, gridiron football. Contact may come about as the result of intentional or incidental actions by the players in the course of play. This is in contrast to noncontact sports where players often have no opportunity to make contact with each other and the laws of the game may expressly forbid contact. In contact sports some forms of contact are encouraged as a critical aspect of the game such as tackling, while others are incidental such as when shielding the ball or contesting an aerial challenge. As the types of contact between players is not equal between all sports they define the types of contact that is deemed acceptable and fall within the laws of the game, while outlawing other types of physical contact that might be considered expressly dangerous or risky such as a high tackle or spear tackle, or against the spirit of the game such as striking below the belt or other unsportsmanlike conduct. Where there is a limit as to how much contact is acceptable most sports have a mechanism to call a foul by the referee, umpire or similar official when an offence is deemed to have occurred.

Contact sports are categorised by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) into three main categories: contact, limited-contact and noncontact. In attempting to define relative risk for competitors in sports the AAP have further defined contact sports as containing some element of intentional collision between players.^[1][2] They define such collision sports as being where: "athletes purposely hit or collide with each other or with inanimate objects (including the ground) with great force", while in limited-contact sports such impacts are often "infrequent and inadvertent".^[1] While contact sports are considered the most high risk for injury, in some sports being a major feature (such as boxing or other martial arts), limited-contact and noncontact sports are not without risk as injury or contact may come about as a result of a fall or collision with the playing area, or a piece of sporting equipment, such as being struck by a hockey stick or football or even a piece of protective wear worn by a teammate or opposition player.

Some definitions of contact sports, particularly martial arts, have the concept of full contact, semi-contact and noncontact (or other definitions) for both training and competitive sparring. Some categories of contact may or may not be combined with other methods of scoring, but full contact is generally considered to include the potential for victory by knockout or submission depending on the form of combat.^[3][4][5] An example of this is full contact karate and taekwondo where competitors are allowed to attempt to knock out an opponent through strikes to the head or otherwise bringing the opponent to the floor.^[6][7] Full contact rules differentiate from other forms of the same sports that may otherwise restrict blows to the head and the use of elbows or knees.^[5] Such full contact sports may be defined as combat sports and require a of change equipment, alter or omit rules, and are generally differentiated from contact sports by their explicit intent of defeating an opponent in physical combat.^[8][3][5]

Some contact sports have limited-contact or noncontact variations (such as flag football for American football) which attempt to replace tackling and other forms of contact with alternative methods of interacting with an opponent, such as removing a flag from a belt worn by the opponent or outlawing specific actions entirely such as in walking football.^[9]