A Chinese humanoid robot beat Usain Bolt's 100-meter world record at Beijing's second robot games

A Chinese humanoid robot named Tiangong Ultra ran the 100 meters in 9.39 seconds at Beijing's National Speed Skating Oval on August 22 — a time that would beat Usain Bolt's actual world record of 9.58 seconds, set at the 2009 World Athletics Championships in Berlin. It happened in competition, on the opening day of the second World Humanoid Robot Games, a five-day event organized by the Beijing municipal government that runs through August 26.

666 teams from 16 countries entered 2,056 robots into 51 events — 30 competitive, 21 scenario-based — spanning track and field, football, dancesport, weightlifting, freestyle fighting, and tasks like screw-tightening and hotel-service simulation. Organizers fielded 223 referees, including 28 at international level, and more than 1,000 humanoid robots took part in the opening ceremony alone, including 80 Booster T2 units forming the word "BEIJING" in a synchronized routine. Last year's inaugural Games drew 280 teams across 26 events — this year's roster is more than double that on both counts.

X-Humanoid, the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center that builds Tiangong Ultra, was established in November 2023 as a national-municipal consortium backed by UBTECH Robotics and Beijing Jingcheng Machinery Electric, among others, and raised roughly $100 million in its first funding round. The Tiangong robot family has moved fast since: the group unveiled Tiangong 3.0 in February 2026 and has iterated at a pace that outstrips almost every other humanoid program's public release cadence.

Tiangong Ultra also cleared 2.88 meters in the standing high jump — well past the human record of 2.45 meters, set by Cuba's Javier Sotomayor in 1993, and well past last year's humanoid best of 0.95 meters. In the humanoid half-marathon, a robot called Lightning, made by smartphone maker Honor, finished in 50 minutes 26 seconds, a pace that would keep it competitive with elite human marathoners over the full 26.2-mile distance.

The headline number gets messier once you look past the actual competition. Honor's Lightning — the same robot that won the half-marathon — was also reported by Chinese state media to have run 9.32 seconds in the 100 meters, faster than Tiangong Ultra's competition time, at a peak speed of 14.5 meters per second. That figure comes from a pre-Games trial, not a Games heat, and Lightning's leg length was reportedly extended by 10 centimeters specifically for the sprint test — a modification that, as far as public reporting shows, wasn't carried into the actual event Tiangong Ultra won.

(None of this is an official World Athletics record — humanoid sprinting isn't a recognized track-and-field event, and "beating Bolt" means beating his time under very different conditions: a machine built specifically to run, on a track and under starting rules the Games set for themselves.) The Associated Press, reporting from the venue, noted that despite the spectacle, humanoid robots today are still mostly used for demonstrations, performances and research; real-world commercial deployment at any real scale remains, in the AP's framing, years away.

International participation was real but lopsided. Sixteen countries sent teams, including the U.S., Japan and Germany, but Chinese-built robots — from X-Humanoid, Honor, and dozens of domestic manufacturers — won nearly every medal on the opening day, unsurprising given how much of the humanoid-robot supply chain already sits inside China. That imbalance is itself part of what the Games are for: a visible demonstration, to buyers and governments watching from outside China, of how far ahead the country's manufacturing base for this specific hardware category already is.

What the Games are actually testing is manufacturing depth, not track and field. China fields more humanoid-robot makers than any other country, and pairing a sports spectacle with harder engineering benchmarks — grip strength, autonomous navigation, task completion in the scenario-based events — gives Beijing a public showcase for that lead. Last year's inaugural 100-meter winner ran it in 21.5 seconds; this year's official winner cut that by more than half in twelve months — a real capability jump independent of how the marketing around "beating Bolt" gets read. The rest of the Games, and the scenario-based results in particular, run through August 26.