'friendly contest' is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it when referring to a competition between two or more people or teams that takes place with a spirit of good sportsmanship and camaraderie. For example: "We had a friendly contest to see who could solve the puzzle the fastest."
It is already proving a far from friendly contest.
A friendly contest creates a peer group and an intensified intellectual atmosphere.
Brazil versus Argentina is never a friendly contest, and of all the teams showing a fresh look this week, Brazil's strategy has again looked the most handsome.
In central areas of London the longer format is hanging on, as social sides enjoy a friendly contest followed by a pint or few in the local pub.
A friendly contest can turn into a pitched battle when the score is tied and the team that scores next wins.
Whether such a friendly contest can be used as a yardstick by which to measure Test candidates is doubtful but then the selectors have little else to judge by.
It became deafening when Iraq's Kurdish hero, Hawar Mulla Mohammed, scored the team's first goal 27 minutes into the match, the second of two friendly contests against a Palestinian team, from another beleaguered place.
After a fortnight of letting what passes for his hair down at assorted criteriums, he will begin preparations for an assault on the rainbow jersey up for grabs at September's World Championship road race, this year a reasonably climber-friendly contest in Tuscany.
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Finding fresh ideas can go beyond internal contests to friendly competition.
The Assemblathon2 contest was organized as a friendly competition to assess current methods and evaluate the state of genome assembly by providing datasets of primarily short reads for three different vertebrate genomes.
