He showed up at the door sporting a pink carnation on his lapel.
The young lady, hoping to impress her coworkers, showed up for work sporting a new, more businesslike hairstyle.
The just-married man emerged from the bridal suite’s bathroom naked, sporting an erection.
How did the word “sporting” come to be used in this manner?
How did “sporting event” come to be synonymous with “athletic contest”?
Are the two usages connected? Which came first?
to sport, meaning to display on the person, or to wear, is cited in the OED from 1778.
I think that “sporting event” useage goes back quite a ways also.
Has it? Maybe this is true in casual American English, but in the UK (and on Wikipedia), “Athletics” refers to track and field events, not sports in general.
It’s not true just in *casual *American English, it’s just the plain old American English meaning of athletics.
In the US, “Athletics” is any competitive physical contest, and is a synonym for sports. Are you a Brit in the US?
If you look it up on Dictionary.com, the british usage is highlighted as a second definition, with “British” in italics.
OK, I shouldn’t have used “casual”. I am very aware that what we have here is a difference between US and UK (and possibly US versus Rest of the World). I was just taking a dig at someone making a general assertion that may actually be true in as few as one or two countries in the world.
But I thought I did well to use “sports” instead of “sport”. I’m slowly learning to speak the local lingo.
I’m visiting the US at the moment from the UK, and after BA lost my luggage I needed to buy a complete formal outfit for a talk I was giving. The bloke in the shop sold me a suit, and then enquired if I was OK for my ‘sporting clothes’. I thought this was pretty funny - sounded to my ears like he thought I needed a basketball top or something.
There must be some mixup here. “Sporting clothes” is not a common term in colloquial American English. “Sporting goods,” yes, but that’s equipment, not apparel.
Witness the American baseball team called the Oakland Athletics. Also the fact that universities have “athletic departments”, which administer all the different sports.
amarone, in the US we call baseball players, football players, basketball players, and track & field competitors all “athletes”. What term do those in the UK use to collectively describe cricket players, rugby players, and football/soccer players?
I’ve always found that one a bit puzzling. You say “sport” where we say "sports, but you say “maths” where we say “math”.
Going back to samclem’s reply:
I wonder if the two usages came about due to the fact that “sporting events” usually include spectators. If we weren’t in the habit of “displaying” these contests for an audience, would the term “sporting event” have evolved? Or did “sporting” in terms of a contest evolve separately? For example, in hunting it’s not considered sporting to shoot an animal that is locked in a pen, which implies that the term referred to “fair play” rather than “on display”.
As another example games of skill, like pool/billiards or poker, are certainly not considered “athletics”, but within those games it’s not unusual to hear the word “sporting” used to mean “fair play”.
A new employee where i used to work was quite short 5’1".
his nick name is “sport”
Sometimes we would call him, “Sport for Short” and other times “Short for Sport” 
He is a fine short sporty feller.
Usually it would be “sportsmen” or “sportswomen”.
Huh. Strangely enough, “sportsman” in the US usually means a recreational hunting or fishing enthusiast.
It has also just occurred to me that the UK difference between “sports” and “athletics” is pretty obvious when you think about it:
“sports” are contests involving an offense and a defense
“athletics” are contests pitting one individual’s mastery of a skill against another individual’s mastery of the same skill
There’s something in that, though it’s probably fairer to say that in the UK “athletics” is a specific subset of “sports”. Americans I have heard tend to refer to it as “track and field”.
In the UK we do generally refer to cycling and rowing as “sports”, and to car and motorcycle racing as “motorsports”.
Could the clerk possibly have said sportswear? That would be a more typically American thing to say, and in that context would mean your casual clothing.
As has alread been answered: sportsmen and sportswomen. And sports departments. We do have Chartlon Athletic and Wigan Athletic football (soccer) teams, though.
Or, asked if you needed a sportcoat or sport jacket?
Apropos of nothing, according to M-W, Sporting House is a synonym for bordello.