China’s Tiangong Ultra ran 100m in 9.39s — last year it needed 21.5 seconds

The machine that ran faster than any human ever has is called Tiangong Ultra, and it crossed the 100-meter finish line at 9.39 seconds on Saturday. Bolt’s 2009 Berlin record — the one no human has broken in seventeen years — stands at 9.58 seconds. The gap is 0.19 seconds.

The race took place at the second annual World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, a competition organized by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center that drew more than 2,000 machines across 51 events. Honor, the Chinese smartphone maker, entered a robot called Lightning, which ran the same 100 meters in 9.47 seconds and later won the half-marathon in 50 minutes and 26 seconds. Both runs beat Bolt’s time. Both happened on the same Saturday morning in August, during an event that most people outside Beijing did not know existed.

The number that matters more than 9.39 seconds is what came before it. At last year’s inaugural games, Tiangong Ultra ran the same distance in 21.5 seconds. The improvement from 21.5 to 9.39 happened in twelve months. No engineering milestone in the history of competitive athletics shows that rate of change on a timescale this short.

But the event was not a race in any conventional sense, and what happened after the finish line told a more complicated story. Both robots slammed directly into padding. Several competitors required human assistance to be removed from the track. Last year’s inaugural games were marked by repeated falls — some spectacular — that were a fair reminder of how far bipedal locomotion still has to go before it resembles anything like the motion Bolt produced in 2009. These robots can sprint faster than any human ever has. They cannot yet stop without running into a wall.

China has made humanoid robotics a state priority, and the Beijing games reflect that investment. This same week, XPeng’s robotics division announced it had raised more than $900 million at a $6.3 billion valuation, with production targeted before the end of 2026. The events at the games ranged from soccer and table tennis to boxing and the half-marathon — research exercises as much as competitions, designed to stress-test locomotion, coordination, and endurance in machines that a year ago could barely cross a finish line upright.

Whether or not robots competing at the games are commercially deployable — they are not, by their own developers’ admission — the 9.39 seconds is already in the record book. The World Humanoid Robot Games runs through August 26.

Tags: China, robotics, Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, humanoid robots, Tiangong Ultra, Usain Bolt