What does it mean if robots run faster than humans?

With the Italian sporting world grappling with the restart of Serie A, it is difficult to shift one’s gaze towards global horizons, especially if those horizons do not have football as their backdrop. There are, however, situations that catch the eye and deserve further attention, such as the second edition of the World Humanoid Robot Games, which has just taken place in Beijing, with over 2,000 robots competing on behalf of sixteen nations. Incidentally, China experienced the recent World Cup in the US almost exclusively through the companies based in the city of Yiwu – a place virtually unknown to Westerners – where 70 per cent of the merchandise sold worldwide during the event was produced and exported: a rather telling lack of interest.

Returning to the main topic, at the top of the 2025 Sport Thinkers ranking—which I compile every year for Il Foglio Sportivo together with Mauro Berruto—we have placed, much to the surprise of our coach Umberto Zapelloni, an unusual sporting figure: a Chinese humanoid robot, Tiangong Ultra, which in April 2025 had completed the Beijing half-marathon on its carbon-fibre legs, the first to achieve this feat in its category. In the same ranking, we also included several researchers from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon (again, predominantly Chinese), the American university regarded as the cradle of robotic engineering studies, who used video footage of the most iconic athletic moves by Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James and Kobe Bryant to train an algorithm governing the movements of humanoid robots, with a view to perfecting them. These choices were not dictated by the almost folkloric exoticism with which such events are almost always discussed in Italy. The ranking is organised around thematic strands, often at the cutting edge, and the link between sport and robotics struck us as one of the most worthy of exploration – going far beyond memories of Paulie grappling with his robot in the opening scenes of Rocky IV.

Just a few months on, this topic has resurfaced in global news – both sporting and non-sporting – with the images that reached us this week from Beijing, which went viral on social media but also made it onto the front page of Corriere della Sera and TG1. A visual spectacle skilfully orchestrated by the Chinese government to highlight the sporting records broken in quick succession by its robots, in particular once again by Tiangong Ultra (which is not, of course, the same prototype that ran the half-marathon, but the model name), capable of ‘outpacing’ Bolt over 100 metres and Van Niekerk over 400 metres. What does all this mean for the world of sport? I shall try to offer two points for consideration.

The first concerns the intertwining of sport and geopolitics. The World Humanoid Robot Games are one of several events in China’s ‘century of sport’, where sport serves as a theatrical vehicle through which to showcase, both domestically and internationally, the industrial, scientific and technological prowess China has achieved. In China, sport – and this has been the case since the early 20th century – has no value in its own right, but only as a tool for political and ideological storytelling. Through the ‘Robot Olympics’, the Chinese are therefore not seeking to market a new form of sports entertainment (perhaps in the future, who knows?), but are using the language of sport – with its unrivalled popular appeal and ritualistic nature – to showcase their industrial progress and test its developments. To demonstrate that China is in the lead, that it has overtaken its rivals, in accordance with the key principle of the ‘geopolitics of the medal table’, which has been extended from the Olympic arena to all other sectors. In this specific case, it is no coincidence that the competitions between humanoid robots took place at the Beijing National Speed Skating Oval, one of the iconic venues of the 2022 Winter Olympics, which were themselves used as a tool for the collective celebration of China’s technological might.

The second point is of a philosophical nature. Setting aside geopolitical aspects, and propaganda that needs to be carefully weighed up – because humanoid robots are still a long way from having any real industrial, commercial or military value, and their grandiose sporting feats serve to mask this reality – these machines prompt us to question the meaning of that thing which attracts us so irresistibly and which we call sport. The history of sport is the history of the body in motion, exerting itself, breaking a sweat, but it is also the history of the progress of human civilisation, when, three millennia ago in Greece, an abundance of food made it possible to exert oneself and expend energy for the glory of victory and a prize – in stark contrast to the athletic capabilities of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, so celebrated today, yet which were the product of a pure logic of survival. In the flow of time, the direction of the history of robotics – including humanoid robotics – is, on the one hand, to make us move, exert ourselves and sweat less and less; on the other, to use our bodies – especially those of athletes – as a sort of museum exhibit. Sport is, in fact, the museum laboratory par excellence of human movement and its graceful complexity – an archive to be used to train, ever more effectively, the algorithms that govern humanoid robots, following the same logic as the books fed to the algorithms of Large Language Models (LLMs), which have been much discussed in recent weeks. In the Chinese context, however, it also represents a symbolic past—that of athletics records—to be plundered with impunity.

Of course, through these advances in humanoid robotics, we also come to appreciate the marvellous, Leonardo-esque complexity of the human machine – a complexity that sport brings to the fore, yet which we tend to take for granted. On the other hand, one of the fathers of modern robotics, the American engineer Marc Raibert, has always recounted how the initial idea came to him in the late 1970s, inspired by his fascination with the ability of animals – and therefore humans – to bounce. And do not the Chinese robots mentioned earlier, which are unable to stop and crash immediately after setting a record, teach us something about the art of deceleration?

Yet there remains an uneasy feeling that sport might suddenly become a relic, an outdated world, even if, in a few years’ time, humanoid robots might well become the ideal sparring partners for many athletes’ training. In the age of athletic artificial intelligence (as defined by Railert), will human sport still serve any purpose?