The 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games opened in Beijing on Saturday with a headline moment that overtook the games themselves: a humanoid robot called Lightning, built by Chinese smartphone maker Honor, ran 100 metres in 9.32 seconds during a preparatory test event, faster than the 9.58-second human world record set by Usain Bolt at the 2009 World Athletics Championships in Berlin.
Two Chinese Bipeds Under Bolt's Record
Lightning's run, reported by China Central Television, clocked a peak speed of 14.5 metres per second. In the games themselves, Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center's Tiangong Ultra won its heat in 9.39 seconds, edging the second place finisher and beating Bolt by nearly two-tenths of a second. Both robots crossed the line before losing balance: Tiangong crashed into a padded barrier meant to catch the finishers and Lightning fell and had to be carried off.
From Half-Marathon to Sprint
Lightning is not a sprint-only project. It won the 21-kilometre Beijing half-marathon in April in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, quicker than the elite human world-record pace. Ahead of the Beijing games, Honor's engineers lengthened its legs from 95cm to 1.05 metres, a mechanical tweak that helped push the robot's top speed and stride length toward human-elite territory.
Tiangong Ultra's 9.39-second run marks a dramatic leap from a year earlier, when the same robot won the inaugural games' 100 metres in 21.50 seconds. The Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, a state-backed lab, has iterated the platform for locomotion research and open-sourced its embodied learning framework.
Bigger Games, Serious Tasks
Running through August 26, this year's World Humanoid Robot Games features 666 teams and 2,056 humanoid robots across 51 events and 1,301 competitions. Alongside track meets, the games add work-oriented challenges for robotic hands including tightening screws, opening bottles and picking up beads with tweezers.
China has designated humanoid robotics as a strategic emerging industry, and the sprint results land during a week of state-run showcases at the parallel World Robot Conference. Deployments from Unitree and other Chinese vendors are moving from spectacle to factory floors, with commercial pilots in manufacturing, logistics and consumer services.
Reporting based on coverage from ABC News, Reuters, NBC News and CGTN.