A humanoid robot running 100 metres in 9.39 seconds sounds extraordinary. At this week’s World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, one machine reportedly beat the world record held by Usain Bolt, while another jumped higher than Javier Sotomayor’s long-standing high jump mark.

On the surface, these achievements appear to represent a new frontier in sport. But comparing robotic and human performance is fundamentally flawed. The World Humanoid Robot Games brought together more than 2,000 robots competing in events ranging from athletics and football to boxing and weightlifting.

The scale of the competition and the technological progress on display were genuinely impressive. According to organisers, participation increased dramatically from previous events, while performance levels improved substantially across several disciplines.

These machines have the shape, appearance and physical characteristics of a human. However, their achievements are the product of entirely different biomechanics, making direct comparisons with athletes problematic.

And sport has never been solely about producing the fastest time, highest jump or heaviest lift. When we watch athletes compete, we are not simply witnessing physical feats.

We are watching people contend with fatigue, pressure, uncertainty, emotion and risk. The Olympic movement itself defines sport through human development and experience as much as results.

Mastering these challenges is just as important as mastering the physical skills required to perform. It is this human experience that gives sporting achievements their meaning and creates the connection between athletes, spectators and the wider sporting community.

A robot may resemble a person, but it does not experience sport in the way humans do. It does not feel nervous standing on a start line, overcome self doubt after injury, or experience the joy of victory and disappointment of defeat.

That is why comparing a robot’s sprint time with Bolt’s world record is ultimately misleading. The real achievement is not athletic excellence. It is technological progress.

The rapid development of humanoid robots is prompting important discussions about how technology will shape the future of sport. Robotics could help coaches analyse performance, improve training methods and push the limits of human achievement even further.

At the same time, sport’s relationship with technology has rarely been straightforward. The introduction of video assistant referees (VAR) in football, for example, remains controversial despite its aim of improving decision-making.

Debates continue over whether technology enhances sport or detracts from the experience for players, officials and fans alike. Humanoid robotics raises even bigger questions. Who will have access to these technologies?

Will they be available across sport, or only to the wealthiest countries, organisations and teams? As with many innovations, there is a risk that robotics could widen existing inequalities by providing greater advantages to those who already possess significant resources.

Although some parts of the western media remain critical of the Games and humanoids, it is important to remember that western sporting culture does not represent all of world sport. Different societies have different relationships with technology and different expectations of what sport can be.

This matters because sport has long been valued as something relatively accessible. Football, often described as the people’s game, became a global phenomenon because participation was possible almost anywhere. Increasing reliance on advanced technologies risks moving sport further away from some of these foundations.

The robot games also revealed how far the technology still has to go. For every record-breaking performance, there were robots falling over, colliding with barriers, crashing into equipment and, in some cases, breaking apart during competition.

One sprinting robot reportedly had to be carried away after hitting a safety barrier and catching fire. Another crashed into a judge’s table during a weightlifting event.

These moments may seem amusing, but they highlight an important reality: humanoid robotics remains a developing technology rather than a finished product.

Even so, the direction of travel is clear. In China, robotics is already becoming increasingly integrated into everyday life and industry. As humanoid technologies continue to develop and spread internationally, debates about their place in sport will only intensify.

For now, robots are not replacing athletes. But in the future, the governing bodies of certain sports may need to answer difficult questions about where robots belong, how they should be regulated and what role they should play in sporting competition.

Ross Walker is affiliated with the University of Stirling.

Leipzig Zoo in central Germany is a world-leading centre of great ape research. Recent studies have seen chimpanzees there using touchscreen controls to navigate virtual forests and locate food rewards – applying similar techniques to what they would use in the wild.

Other research (of which I was part) has investigated chimpanzees’ social curiosity. We discovered they actively seek out information about others’ interactions, even if it means forgoing food rewards. Keeping track of their peers’ latest social developments appears central to these great apes’ social wellbeing.

But in my decade working with Leipzig Zoo’s chimpanzees and bonobos, one question came up repeatedly. Were differences in how each great ape would cooperate and resolve conflicts simply down to its mood on a particular day? Or were there longer-term explanations – deep-rooted personality traits, for example, or their relationship history with other apes?

Long-term questions like this are very difficult to tackle in single studies, which often draw on just a handful of participants. So, my colleagues and I have developed EVApeCognition: a standardised database of 18 years’ worth of great ape experiences, decisions and relationships.

This lays the groundwork for answering many more questions about these extraordinary creatures’ cognition, intelligence and social behaviour. If a bonobo showed striking generosity towards a partner in 2008, for example, we can piece together whether that behaviour was linked with their stable disposition, a particular relationship, or some other factor.

Changing how we study great apes

In all, EVApeCognition comprises 262 experimental datasets from 150 scientific publications between 2004 and 2021. These were all overseen by the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Centre, headquartered at Leipzig Zoo. Eighty-one great apes participated in these studies, with the vast majority (78) taking part in more than one.

These wide-ranging social cognition studies have assessed how great apes think about other apes, how they cooperate, and to what extent they are motivated to help their peers. But there have been limitations to this research.

In the wild, great apes are social animals who live in stable groups with histories, hierarchies and relationships that change over time. In contrast, a large majority of the studies in our database were with apes in pairs that imposed strict control conditions.

So, moving to larger-group studies could offer a more ecologically relevant window on their cognition and social behaviour. Group settings can present apes with different problems that map more closely on to the social challenges they face every day in the wild.

Our most recent study, led by Kirsten Sutherland at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, found that great ape quartets maintained access to a pool of yoghurt for significantly longer than pairs did. Social tolerance played a key role, with more tolerant quartets maintaining access to the yoghurt for longer periods.

We found that cooperation was strongest when the highest-ranking individual showed restraint, emphasising the importance of tolerant leadership.

The new database also highlights an imbalance running through captive great ape research: chimpanzees dominate the record, while bonobos, gorillas and orangutans remain comparatively underrepresented.

Bonobos – which, unlike chimpanzees, are known to cooperate in the wild outside the limits of their group’s territory – would be particularly compelling subjects for this research shift towards studying larger groups.

Closing the gap with wild settings

Experimental performance does not occur in a social vacuum. A great ape’s willingness to cooperate on a task on a given Tuesday may not only reflect its intelligence, but whether it groomed its partner that morning, or if its status had changed within the group.

Providing this context is essential to understanding how everyday experience and social relations shape their cognitive development. Fortunately, the field is moving in promising directions, with the EVApeCognition database one piece of a larger picture.

The global ManyPrimates project, established in 2017, has already produced the most comprehensive overview of primate short-term memory. This shows that genetic lineage has played a larger role than ecology or sociality in the evolution of their short-term memory.

At the level of higher-order reasoning, we now know that chimpanzees update their beliefs by considering all sources of information before making a choice. A 2025 study showed they remained committed to an initial belief when counter-evidence was weaker, but revised this when the supporting evidence became stronger – a pattern long thought to be distinctly human.

Perhaps most ambitiously, the divide between captive and wild settings is also beginning to close. Research led by Sofie Forss at the University of Zurich, for example, has found a systematic “captivity effect” when presenting the same new stimuli to both wild and captive orangutans. The wild individuals responded far more cautiously to novelty than their zoo-housed counterparts.

Taken together, these efforts point in a common direction: toward an understanding of great ape cognition that is at once broader in scope, richer in context, and more faithful to the complexity of their social lives.

Alejandro Sánchez-Amaro does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.