Two robots went under Bolt’s record in one qualifying heat — and the third one fell at the line

Beijing’s National Speed Skating Oval hosted the ninth qualifying heat of the 100 m at the second World Humanoid Robot Games on 22 August 2026. The Tiangong entry, built by the Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics, crossed the line in 9.39 s. Lightning, entered by the smartphone maker Honor, led almost all the way and lost the race near the finish, clocking 9.47 s. Usain Bolt’s human record, set in Berlin in 2009, is 9.58 s — in this single heat two machines went under it. The number worth keeping is not the comparison with Bolt but the one with last year. At the inaugural games in 2025 the best time over this distance was 21.50 s. Twelve months later the leading machine covers the same 100 m in less than half of that, more than 12 s quicker. What the results sheet does not show is how the heat ended. The Unitree machine, third across the line, fell just past it and stayed down; organisers had lined the run-off with padded barriers for exactly this reason. Sprinting is a control problem with a beginning and an end, and only the beginning has been solved: these robots can now accelerate harder than a human, but stopping on their own terms is still beyond some of them. That is a fair description of the state of humanoid locomotion in general — peak performance is arriving faster than the ability to fail safely. The games run from 22 to 26 August and gather 666 teams with 2,056 robots from 16 countries, across 51 events. Of those teams, 641 are Chinese.