A Humanoid Robot Breaks Usain Bolt’s 100m Record, But Roboticists Are Unimpressed
Two thousand robots are competing in Beijing across 51 events, showcasing a specific skill that machines excel at, but ignoring the challenges that remain.
August 23, 2026
A robot from Beijing’s X-Humanoid ran 100 meters in 9.39 seconds, beating Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second record at the World Humanoid Robot Games.
It wasn’t just speed records that fell. The same company’s robot cleared a 2.88-meter high jump, surpassing Javier Sotomayor’s 2.45-meter mark. Another robot from phone maker Honor clocked 9.32 seconds in trials.
This massive event included over 2,000 robots from 16 countries participating in 51 events at Beijing’s Olympic speed skating oval.
The significant growth from the previous year’s games highlights the progress being made. At the 2025 games, Unitree’s H1 won the 400-meter race in 88 seconds, compared to the human record of 43 seconds. Many of these robots’ achievements were remote-controlled.
However, experts are quick to point out that this doesn’t represent a breakthrough. Rodney Brooks, an MIT emeritus professor behind iRobot, dismissed an earlier Beijing robot race as a "publicity stunt" with "nothing useful… because it shows no safety at all."
While the robots have improved in terms of autonomy, they still largely follow pre-programmed routes. Yanran Ding from the University of Michigan emphasizes the misconception that running faster than humans is harder than simple tasks like folding laundry.
European companies are betting on this gap, focusing on training robots in complex environments and scaling up manufacturing. NEURA Robotics creates gyms for robot training, while Humanoid raised $152 million with Bosch planning large-scale manufacturing.
Despite the media buzz, these achievements represent a machine doing something a person needs to do—but not yet achieving true artificial general intelligence.