In sports, an individual athlete, or, more commonly, an athletic team collectively, is often said to have choked when failing to win a tournament or league championship and if certain other criteria are also met, especially if the player or team had been favored to win, or had squandered a large lead in the late stages of an event. The usage of the word "choke" in this sense is generally treated as slang.

Use of the term "choke" in this context is most frequently encountered in the United States, and appears to be of relatively recent origin, not becoming reasonably widespread until well into the 1960s. Some of the earliest examples of such use occurred in football, the label being pinned on such NFL teams as the Dallas Cowboys and Oakland Raiders, who perennially reached the playoffs throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, with the Cowboys not winning the Super Bowl until the one held immediately following the 1971 season and the Raiders not doing likewise until 1976. In these two examples, the two quarterbacks of the respective teams, Don Meredith and Daryle Lamonica, were singled out in particular as having "choked" — and both had retired by the time their teams finally did win the Super Bowl.

Since then, NFL teams popularly labelled chokers (or often, "choke artists") have included the Minnesota Vikings more or less throughout the 1970s, the San Diego Chargers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and, most recently, the Philadelphia Eagles in the early 2000s; and in all three instances the respective quarterbacks for these three teams — Fran Tarkenton, Dan Fouts and Donovan McNabb — have also been stereotyped personally along with the entire teams themselves, McNabb adding to his reputation for choking with three interceptions in the Eagles' 24-21 loss to the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XXXIX after having been intercepted only eight times during the entire 2004 regular season.

Peyton Manning has also been labeled a "choker" in his career as well, due to the University of Tennessee's head-to-head losses to conference rival Florida during Manning's tenure there from 1994 to 1997, coupled with Tennessee's 42-17 Orange Bowl loss to Nebraska in the latter year that decided the national championship that season, along with the fact that Tennessee did win the national title in 1998 after Manning had graduated. In the NFL, he has been excoriated for not leading the Indianapolis Colts to a playoff victory until the 2003 season (going 14 for 31 with two interceptions as the Colts lost 41-0 to the New York Jets in a 2002 playoff game, for example), when he led Indianapolis to postseason victories over the Denver Broncos and Kansas City Chiefs before throwing four interceptions and compiling a passer rating of 35.5 in a 24-14 loss to the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship game. And despite Manning's amazing 2004 season that included breaking the single-season touchdown pass record previously held by Dan Marino with 49 TD passes, Manning and the Colts would once again lose to the Patriots in the playoffs, which once again brought up his history of not being able to "win the big game." Worse yet, Indianapolis neglected to score a touchdown in this game (losing 20-3), making it two playoff games since 2002 in which the Colts did not score a touchdown out of six postseason games played, compared with only one regular-season game out of 48 over the same period.

Fewer teams qualify for postseason play in Major League Baseball than in the NFL, so the "choke" label in baseball is more frequently appended to a team that blows a substantial lead late in a pennant race. Probably the two most prominent examples of this have been the Chicago Cubs (most notably in 1969 and 1973) and the Boston Red Sox (most notably in 1978, when they relinquished a 14-game lead in their division, ultimately losing a one-game playoff for the division title to the New York Yankees after they and the Yankees had ended the regular season tied for first place). The plight of both the Cubs and Red Sox has often been attributed to a "curse" — the Curse of the Billy Goat in the former team's case and the Curse of the Bambino in the latter, although the Curse of the Bambino is widely regarded as having been broken in 2004 when the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time since 1918; in what is regarded as a breathtaking role reversal, in the 2004 American League Championship Series against the Red Sox, the Yankees became the first team in professional baseball history, and only the third team in North American professional team sports history, to lose a best-of-seven series after having taken a 3-0 series lead. This "feat" has been recognized as one of the worst and most embarrassing chokes in sports history.

Teams in other sports, such as basketball and hockey, have also had to endure allegations of choking at various times, and athletes in individual sports have not been immune either, particularly in tennis (Virginia Wade, dubbed "The Queen of the Centre Court Choke" by the British tabloid press due to her long string of late-round defeats at Wimbledon — a tournament she did eventually win) and golf (Phil Mickelson until he finally won a "major" golf tournament in 2004 — specifically, the Masters — after a host of second- and third-place finishes in such events).

Generally, if postseason play is involved, the further a team progresses without actually winning the championship, the more likely that the team will be accused of choking (a team that gets eliminated in the early rounds will usually escape the stigma). Also, whether or not the team was favored by the oddsmakers and/or had home-field advantage can be a key issue, and if a team fades in the late stages of a postseason contest or playoff series, that fact is quite often treated as evidence that the club choked.

Recidivism — that is to say, the same player or team coming close to winning the championship repeatedly without ever actually succeeding in doing so — is another aggravating factor, and indeed this condition is present in virtually all of the most proverbial examples of those castigated as chokers; however, once the competitor does win a title, the "choke" tag is typically not reapplied even if the prior pattern of falling short resurfaces: For example, baseball's Atlanta Braves are rarely characterized as chokers despite a lengthy overall record of futility in the postseason, for which they have qualified for 13 consecutive years starting in 1991, because they did manage to win the World Series once, in 1995.