rival

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Competitors & participants in sports & games
anchorman
attacker
back four
baller
ballplayer
competitor
jumper
keeper
logroller
long-jumper
longboarder
major league
mid-table
opponent
retire
torero
toxophilite
traceur
trampolinist
trialist

Examples from literature

In pity of the challenger's youth I would fain dissuade him, but he will not be entreated. 
So he leaped from his chariot, in his clanging armor, and advanced to meet the challenger. 
The tournament being over, the Norman offered himself as general challenger at wrestling. 
The two challengers having found him alone would not take any advantage of him, but agreed to fight him one after the other, like brave and generous knights. 
You are bigger than I, and it would hardly be fair, replied Tom, surveying the bulky form of his challenger. 

challenger | American Dictionary

challenger
noun[ C ]
us/ˈtʃæl·ən·dʒər/
someone who tries to win a competition and achieve a position, esp. in politics or sports, against someone who has won it and now has that position:
An aide to Buchanan said the conservative challenger for the presidency would hold a press conference tomorrow.

Examples of challenger

challenger
If so, the incumbent remains, and the challenger adapts another new platform.
His arguments on each of these issues were not, ultimately, concerned with the merits of one or another of the challengers' claims.
This result is somewhat misleading because of the inclusion of an interaction term containing the challenger party variable.
For the challenger, experiencing a positive payoff outcome requires that the defender submit to his demands without fighting too much.
As a result, the incumbent must spend more resources in order to match the challenger's offer.
These potential challengers decide one by one whether to enter the market in their home cities.
A leader thwarts a challenge if she either retains a winning coalition or prevents the challenger from assembling a winning coalition.
According to him, incumbent politicians in democracies have to fear that challengers mobilise disaffected voters.
Apparently challengers who are disadvantaged in terms of resources and name recognition offer moderate positions in an attempt to compensate for their non-policy liabilities.
What remains unanswered, and mostly unaddressed, is an explanation of when challengers succeed in upsetting an industry and the standards imposed by dominant firms.
She can credibly commit to include these individuals in every future coalition, while the challenger can offer them access to future private goods only probabilistically.
Finally, the authors argue that grammar-based language models are serious challengers for corpus-based models.
The greatest possible offer the challenger can make is to spend all available resources optimally on the smallest possible coalition.
Electorally speaking, there were no credible challengers as a consequence of weak party competition.
First, challengers against safe incumbents tend to be inexperienced and thus spend money inefficiently.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.