throw down the gauntlet

gauntlet | American Dictionary

gauntlet
noun[ C ]
us/ˈɡɔnt·lət, ˈɡɑnt-/
a long thick glove (= covering for the hand), worn for protection

Examples of gauntlet

gauntlet
In recognition of the dangers otherwise involved, masks, protective clothing (normally white) and gauntlets are worn.
The party did not throw down the gauntlet and agitate in the army.
With storytellers' lives, it seems, a gauntlet of challenge is thrown down for the organization under investigation.
I have to wonder whether and how the player is supposed to recognize the gauntlet being thrown down here.
No need to take up the gauntlet thrown down by the faculty-centred conservatism defeater.
The fresco offers a narrative of achievement, of effective protection: the criminal caught, the knight's gauntlet thrown down in defense of the weak.
The complexity of the theoretical system makes this a real challenge, but its appeal makes it worth taking up the gauntlet.
They recognized that some of their objectives could be reached by administrative action without running the gauntlet of the legislative process.
When war fortuitously brought the opportunity to expunge the savage and end that threat, they took up the gauntlet with an unprecedented ferocity.
The issues in adolescence and young people with cancer run the gauntlet from physical to psychological.
As wind or water turned the cylinder, the rags were drawn through the gauntlet of opposed metal and shredded.
Clearly the gauntlet had been thrown down.
More than the poets, however, it was the 1930s writers of novels and short stories who picked up that key modernist gauntlet-the quest for an integrated personality.
Who will pick up the gauntlet ?
Taylor himself meanwhile is simultaneously more radical in his account of incommensurability and less malleable in his stance towards the other (presumably throwing down the gauntlet to 'soft' relativists).
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