Humanoid robots smash Usain Bolt’s 100-meter record
The Verge Jess Weatherbed ● Covered by 3 sources
Chinese robots just beat Usain Bolt’s 100-meter mark in Beijing. It happened at a robot games built to show how fast bipedal machines are getting.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Jess Weatherbed — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second 100-meter record has finally been beaten — by robots. At the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, Tiangong Ultra ran the distance in 9.39 seconds during a preliminary heat on Saturday. Another Chinese machine, the Honor-developed Lightning, finished just behind it at 9.47.
That puts a very human-sounding milestone in a very non-human context. The event is being used as a showcase for bipedal robot technology, and the 100-meter dash is exactly the kind of clean, simple test that makes progress easy to see. Fast is fast, even when the runner has joints, motors, and a lot less swagger than Bolt.
Tiangong Ultra was made by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center. The record run came during this year’s games, where the same robot also broke the 400-meter world record. So this wasn’t a one-off lucky burst; it was part of a broader showing.
The event itself has been framed as something like an annual robot Olympics. This year’s edition follows a launch in 2025 and includes 2,056 robots from 16 countries. That’s a lot of machines competing for bragging rights, and this week, the bragging rights are Chinese.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The point isn’t that robots beat Bolt; the point is that we now call that a demo and move on. That’s the modern AI and robotics playbook: turn a headline-grabbing stunt into proof of momentum, then ask for another round of funding. Charming, really.
Read more about this at: The Verge
