pip to the post

• pip at the post

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pip to the post (third-person singular simple present pips to the post, present participle pipping to the post, simple past and past participle pipped to the post)

1. (idiomatic, sports) To overcome a strong competitor in a sporting event, especially by gaining a small advantage at the last decisive moment.
   • 2012 June 23, Simon Usborne, The Independent, article title:

     "Pipped to the post: What happens to famous athletes who just miss a place on the podium?" (end of the title) A place on the podium can be missed by tiny fractions – and finish a career. Simon Usborne talks to some famous Olympian losers about the moment their dream ended.

2. (idiomatic) To overcome a prominent competitor, gaining their position, especially by making a smart, sudden move.
   • 1988 January 4, A Soap That Stings, New York Magazine, page 14:

     What may bar EastEnders from acceptance in the U.S. is not immorality but unintelligibility. PBS may even distribute a glossary of Cockney phrases so that Americans will know what a character means when he or she is "over the moon," "skint," "pipped to the post," or "in the club" (happy, broke, defeated, or pregnant).

   • 2004, Iwan Rhys Morus, When Physics Became King, page 158:

     Both were pipped to the post in 1888 by the German physicist Heinrich Hertz, a student of Hermann von Helmholtz (himself one of the towering figures of nineteenth-century German physics) who announced to the world that he had found a way of propagating and detecting these long-sought-for electromagnetic waves.

• be left at the post