The reason I mentioned the Romans is, of course, because Latin comes from them. And so how they viewed competition is likely to be reflected in the word, as they coined it, or at least the word that would end up being used through the ages. It's actually why I bothered to look it up, because it didn't really jive with what one thinks of when you think of the Romans and competition - a militaristic empire that would host competitions, to the death, for entertainment and sport. Not entirely far removed from how even their aristocracy competed with one another. By contrast the other meanings of petere most certainly do!

On Magnus - there's a huge chess subculture, so it's hard to reference any given thing. I might start with this [1]. He's giving every single reason for why he might decline in the future, which I think terrifies him. It's quite unpleasant to imagine that you'll not only never be as strong as you once were, but that you will start to see your strength all so gradually decline, year by year.

So amongst his million preemptive excuses, you also him somewhat rewriting history now claiming his "2 down, 5 to go" comment was "just trolling." He made that comment after his second world championship victory, which was extremely convincing - as it was against the previous generation of players. For some context, no chess world champion has ever won/defended their title more than 6 times. The most dominant champions ever, Lasker/Karpov/Kasparov all won/defended 6 times a piece. Magnus, it seems, will go down with 5.

[1] - https://www.chess.com/news/view/carlsen-on-his-future-person...