campion

Champion comes from Old French campion, from Medieval Latin campio or campionem, derived from Latin campus ('open field, plain, field of battle'). The campus was first a geographical term — any level open ground — and then specifically the space reserved for military exercise and formal combat. The Campus Martius in Rome, the Field of Mars, was where Roman soldiers trained and where military and political assemblies were held. From the field of training and battle, campus gave the world not only champion but also camp (a temporary military field), campaign (a military operation conducted in the field), and eventually the academic campus (the open grounds of a university, modeled on the Roman public field). Champion is the fighter who enters that field.

In medieval law, a champion was a specific legal functionary: a professional fighter hired to represent a party in trial by combat. Trial by combat — the judicial duel — was a recognized legal procedure in medieval Europe whereby disputes could be resolved by designating representatives to fight on behalf of each party, with God presumed to favor the party in the right. A litigant who was old, ill, female, or physically incapable of fighting could hire a campion — a champion — to fight in their place. The champion's victory was the client's legal victory. This practice gave the word its sense of 'one who fights on behalf of another,' which then extended to the figurative sense of advocating for a cause: a champion of justice, a champion of the poor.

The athletic sense of champion — the winner of a competition — developed from the combat sense through natural extension. The person who wins a competition has 'taken the field' and defeated all comers, as a campion did in judicial combat. Medieval tournaments — the organized combats in which knights demonstrated martial skill for prizes and prestige — produced champions in both the older sense (fighters) and the newer sense (winners). By the time organized sport began developing formal championship structures in the nineteenth century, 'champion' was already available to name the winner — and 'championship' named both the title and the competition that determined it.

The figurative champion — the person who advocates for a cause — represents a different but equally old semantic branch. To champion a cause is to enter the field on its behalf, to take up the fight that the cause cannot fight for itself. Political champions, social champions, moral champions — the word is used wherever someone takes an active, visible, committed stance on behalf of something or someone else. This sense preserves the original medieval function most faithfully: the campion who entered the lists for a weak client, who put his body between the client's claim and the opposition's blade. To champion something is still to fight for it publicly, to be willing to take the field.