Beijing — A humanoid robot has run 100 meters faster than the fastest human in history. At the opening night of the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing's National Speed Skating Oval on Friday, the Tianzhuo team's entry — a Tiangong Ultra robot from the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center — crossed the line in 9.39 seconds, inside Usain Bolt's 9.58-second human world record set in 2009.
A year ago, at the first edition of these Games, the best any humanoid managed over 100 meters was 21.50 seconds. In twelve months, the frontier has moved by more than half — a pace of improvement no biological athlete has ever matched.
Two human records down in one night
The 100m wasn't the only human benchmark to fall. In the standing-jump demonstration, Tiangong Ultra cleared 2.8843 meters — nearly 44 centimeters beyond the best human standing jump on record — and roughly three times the 95.6 cm that won the same event at last year's Games.
In the 400m heats, the Tiangong team's robot led its group in 39.70 seconds, ahead of Tianxiao (40.14s) and Honor's Twin-Speed squad (40.67s), with finals scheduled for August 26.
The engineering behind the numbers is straightforward to list and brutal to execute: higher-power joint motors for acceleration and explosive jumps, an aerodynamic, lightweight frame, project-specific thermal management for sustained exertion, and a motion stack built on the center's Huisi Kaiwu platform — now upgraded so the robot navigates the track without following painted lines, holding its lane at full speed through pure onboard perception.
The twist: Unitree finished last in its heat
The Games' sharpest subplot: Unitree — the newly listed humanoid leader that shipped more robots than anyone last year — finished its 100m heat in 12.41 seconds, behind Tianzhuo's 9.39 and the Fenghuo Lightning team's 9.47. The company issued a statement after the race, saying its energy remains focused on mass production, apologizing that it could only field a reduced slate of events, and wishing rivals well as they push robot athletics to new marks.
That is the story of this Games in miniature: the champions of commercial volume and the champions of athletic extremes are no longer the same players. Honor's Flash robot — which served as the athletes' oath-taker at the opening ceremony, speaking for all 2,056 entrants — had clocked 9.32 seconds and a peak of 14.5 m/s in pre-Games testing, hinting that the final on August 26 could go even faster.
Scale of the event
The second World Humanoid Robot Games runs through August 26 with 2,056 robots from 666 teams across 16 countries — team count up 138% and robot count quadrupled from the inaugural edition. The program has doubled to 51 events and 1,301 contests, adding weightlifting, tug-of-war, table tennis and long jump to the athletics core, alongside 21 applied-scenario competitions covering homes, hotels, logistics and nine other domains.
Nearly all track events are now fully autonomous — no remote control — and scenario events weight autonomy at full marks while teleoperated runs score at half, a rulebook that quietly rewards exactly the capabilities factories and warehouses are waiting for.
Fast legs, patient business
For embodied-AI watchers, the meaning of 9.39 seconds is not that robots will sprint into homes next quarter. It is that whole-body dynamic control — balance, gait switching, real-time perception at speed — has crossed a threshold that legged robotics chased for a decade. The same control stack that keeps a 1.4-meter-tall machine upright at 10.5 m/s is what keeps a delivery robot from tipping on a curb, or a factory humanoid from stumbling on a cable.
The record will fall again, possibly within this week. What it proves is that the physical ceiling of humanoid robots now sits above the human one — and the remaining question, as the World Robot Conference unfolds across town, is entirely about everything except the legs.
