A robot ran 100 m in 9.39 s — and neither of the two machines that beat Bolt could stop at the finish

Beijing's National Speed Skating Oval hosted the 100 m final of the second World Humanoid Robot Games on 22 August 2026. Tiangong Ultra, built by the Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics, crossed the line in 9.39 s. Lightning, entered by the smartphone maker Honor, led early 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. The number worth keeping is not the comparison with Bolt but the one with last year. At the inaugural games in 2025 the same Tiangong Ultra won the same distance in 21.50 s. Twelve months later it is 12.11 s faster over the same 100 m — the machine now covers the distance in less than half the time it needed a year ago. What the medal table does not show is how both runs ended. Tiangong veered off after the line and hit the padded barrier that organisers put there for exactly this reason; Lightning fell and was carried off. 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 neither of them can yet decelerate on its own terms. 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.