Dog, could you elaborate on your comment?
Sparring is, for most people, an integral part of MA training. I think it's pretty much impossible to spar without the people involved competing with each other. That doesn't make the art a sport. It becomes a sport, I think, when the competition (which will invariably include a ruleset restricting the use of at least some portion of the art) becomes the primary goal of training.
In the US, this is actually a legal definition. I don't know the background on how it all ended up in the courts, but there was apparently a case in which a school (or schools) was sued for not offering as many sporting options for females as males. Again, I don't know the details. But the school argued that cheerleading should count as a sport. The court said that it didn't count, because although cheerleading competitions certainly exist, it wasn't the primary purpose of the activity. This was based on the number of competitions they would go to, compared to the number of games they went to with the purpose of supporting the school teams. So their legal definition of sport was, essentially, an activity with the primary purpose of competing. This made sense to me. It also gave me ammo for teasing one of our daughters who was a cheerleader.
In our system, it's always been customary to have ranks within ranks. So for example, if there were 9 yellow belts and you weren't at the top end, you wouldn't need to worry about testing just yet.
During training, students can challenge people ahead of them. Or a group could challenge at the same time. The people involved come in front of the class and perform a sort of mini-test in front of the instructors and senior students. They're graded. That gives them their ranking within their belt.
That's all competition. Competition does not equal sport.
