Any historical sports with instant-win moves?

Question

I was recently watching Harry Potter (because I'm super-cool), and it occurred to me: has there ever been a sport that had something akin to catching the snitch in Quidditch, where the game immediately ends in victory, regardless of how long you've been playing or how well you've been doing?

All sports I can think of generally end after a certain period of time (e.g. basketball), a certain number of turns (e.g. innings in baseball), or a certain number of milestones (e.g. holes in golf). With all of them, though, victory is the result of earning points as you go, so the winner can be predicted with increasing certainty as the session progresses. There may be a 9th-inning rally, but even if you turn it around in the last 2 minutes, you still have to close the distance and eventually overtake your opponent's score before you win.

Non-physical games often have instant-win conditions (e.g. checkmate in chess) where you could be doing horribly and then instantly be the winner, but are there any (or have there been any in history) physical sports that have similar potential? I seem to recall that the ball game of the Aztecs had something like this, but the accounts I'm finding online seem to disagree with each other.

Answer 1

Boxing has a win in 10 seconds via knockout, or instantly if the referee calls it.

Answer 2

I have found record of one sport that had an instant win move. The Mesoamerican ballgame, whose modern descendant is known as ulama, could be won with a single move: putting the ball through a ring.

This was said to be so difficult that it rarely occurred.

From Wikipedia:

According to 16th century Aztec chronicler Motolinia, points were gained if the ball hit the opposite end wall, while the decisive victory was reserved for the team that put the ball through a ring. However, placing the ball through the ring was a rare event—the rings at Chichen Itza, for example, were set 6 meters off the playing field—and most games were likely won on points.

Roger Highfield speculates in The Science of Harry Potter: How Magic Really Works that Quidditch may have been based on this Mesoamerican ballgame because of its magic/religious significance:

I suspect the answer to these questions may lie in Central America, Mesoamerica, where an extraordinary ball game--perhaps the most amazing of all time--contains intriguing echoes of Quidditch and its American variant, Quodpot. Indeed, I was surprised that this does not even merit a passing mention in Quidditch Through the Ages, marking a serious omission by Kennilworthy Whisp.

The people who took part in Nahualtlachtli, which means the magic ball game, were probably involved in the very first team sport. The game was played for thousands of years and probably started in Mexico in around 1500 B.C., with Mesoamerica's first great civilization, the Olmec, according to Manuel Aguilar of California State University, Los Angeles. By 1200 B.C. it was being played in Oaxaca, the Mexican highland and in the west of Mesoamerica, notable El Opeño, Michoacán. The location of its birthplace is no accident, for the balls were made of rubber, which originated in Mesoamerica.

Further down, he notes:

The ball game was indeed a cermonial activity that celebrated a magical battle for survival, where a human team was symbolically pitched against the gods and the awesome powers of the natural world. Each clash was seen as a struggle between the opposing forces of day and night, good and evil, and life and death, echoing how the best games of Quidditch put sly Slytherin against noble Gryffindor.

The game was richly textured with symbolism to reflect the creation story.

Sources:

• Mesoamerican ballgame - Wikipedia

_{Wikipedia references Shelton, Anthony A. (2003). "The Aztec Theatre State and the Dramatization of War". In Tim Cornell and Thomas B. Allen (eds.). War and Games. New York: Boydell Press. ISBN 978-0-85115-870-9.}

• The Science of Harry Potter: How Magic Really Works - Roger Highfield (excerpt)

Answer 3

Nine-ball pool meets this criteria, and is currently played in tournament settings.

In Nine-ball, unlike in the standard Eight-ball pool that more people are familiar with, anytime a player puts the nine-ball in the pocket with a legal shot, that player wins. It doesn't matter how many other balls either player has gotten in. Player A could pocket the first eight balls, but if Player B puts in the nine-ball, Player B is the winner. Nine-ball really has no score; a single event wins the game, and it can happen at any time.

In Eight-ball pool, there is actually a progression to the game, and one player can be ahead of the other. However, the player that is behind can still instantly win the game if the player that is ahead pockets the eight-ball prematurely. You might think of this as more of an instant-lose event rather than an instant-win.

If you want to count instant-lose scenarios, there are a number of sports (races, for example) where the person that is ahead can disqualify themselves by breaking rules, and the person behind can win.

Answer 4

The boxing answer seems to answer the question in affirmative, but I think this is an exception rather then the rule: KO/ippon are called when the blow has been "decisive", usually meaning that the loosing opponent cannot continue anyway. In fact, the inability to continue is the basis for "technical KO".

I think the answer to the question should be something like "there is no instant-wins in common sports, except for the situations when one of the sides cannot continue."

Sports seem to favour the one who can sustained prolonged advantage: that is more fair as well as better for spectators. However, when one side cannot or would not continue, whether by receiving KO, or by getting deemed decisively outmatched, or by getting disqualified, or by forfeiture, only then the other side gets awarded the instant win. In a way, that's the punishment for denying the spectators the prolonged match they were expecting. :)

Answer 5

I started to offer Pankration, as an example, but then I found this anecdote:

In an odd turn of events, a pankration fighter named Arrhichion (Ἀρριχίων) of Phigalia won the pankration competition at the Olympic Games despite being dead. His opponent had locked him in a chokehold and Arrhichion, desperate to loosen it, broke his opponent's toe (some records say his ankle). The opponent nearly passed out from pain and submitted. As the referee raised Arrhichion's hand, it was discovered that he had died from the chokehold. His body was crowned with the olive wreath and taken back to Phigaleia as a hero. Wikipedia

If killing your opponent didn't qualify as a win, then I can't imagine an instant win.

Answer 6

Many simple races fit your criteria: Doesn't matter how well you did before or how long it takes you - just get over the finish line first, and you win immediately.

Answer 7

Not only does boxing currently have the ten-second KO rule and the ancillary TKO rule (in which a referee can stop a fight at any time if it looks like the consequences of keeping the fight going are greater than charging a guy a loss - this happens when a fighter is "out on his feet" but also, for instance, when he's cut over one of his eyes and can't see the punches coming in) but its pre-Marquis of Queensbury origins generally had fights run as follows:

1. The boxers would fight until one of them was knocked down. This ended a "round" of boxing. As you might imagine, they often lasted longer than 3 minutes.
2. The boxers were given some short amount of time to get themselves ready to go. Nowadays the time between rounds is 60 seconds, to give you some idea of how long a recently knocked-down fighter might have.
3. By some period of time, both fighters would have to meet each other in the center of the fighting arena at a line scratched out in the dirt. If one of the fighters was unable or unwilling to reach this point, the contest was called in favor of his opponent.

Incidentally, this is the origin of the phrase "up to scratch".

Another thing that can happen in boxing, and I think this is as close as you're going to get to the Quidditch parallel, is that if one boxer accidentally fouls another in such a way that the latter is unable to proceed, the bout is scored as follows:

• If less than 4 complete rounds have been fought, the fight is ruled a technical draw.
• If 4 or more complete rounds have been fought, the judges' scorecards are revealed and whoever is leading on them wins. This process is known as a technical decision.

Source

Note that unlike in Quidditch you don't get a point boost for causing the accidental foul. In fact, if the referee decides that your foul was intentional, he has the right to award a victory to your opponent by way of disqualification. The most common way this kind of thing happens, since most fouls are kind of obvious, is on an accidental head butt - for example, both fighters duck at the same time and hit each other in the head, causing a cut to form over one of the men's eyes. To further cloud this issue, such a cut might not become too severe to play though for a couple of rounds after it was created. At that point there could be some consternation on both sides because if a legal punch caused the cut, the result is a TKO, not a technical decision.

The other primary way a sport can end before its predetermined limit is the mercy rule. For instance, softball up into college has a rule that states that if you pull ahead of your opponent by 10 runs or more, the game is instantly called right then and there. This is a little important when playing a ball-and-bat game between potentially wide ranges of opposition since a game could theoretically never end if one side lacked the ability to put the other side out.