Sport and training

The list for a sport somebody plays rather than watches. At the end of it sits abandonner, and the difference from English is not in what it means but in what it needs. « To abandon » must have an object: you abandon a car, a plan, a post. French lets the verb stand alone, and in sport that is its most common use — il a abandonné à mi-parcours means he pulled out halfway, and nothing is named because the thing given up is the race itself. The English for it is « to retire » or « to pull out », neither of which looks anything like the French word. And the trap runs the other way too: an « abandoned match » is one the referee called off, which French calls un match interrompu — nobody walked away. So the same verb describes a competitor in one language and an official in the other.