Unitree's newest humanoid is called Superman, which tells you the mood. It jumps two metres from a standing start, then runs off at 12.66 metres per second - marginally quicker at the peak (12.3m/s) than Usain Bolt managed in Berlin. It also moves like something that has just remembered it left the gas on.
The jump is the thing that really got me. I think I'd assumed that they would run and climb and, erm, empty dishwashers more quickly than us. But I hadn't thought about a standing jump of over 2m. Give it another year and walls the size of Troy's (9m) might be in range. Because a lot can happen in a year.
Compare this year's robot races against last year and the gap is eye-wideningly obvious. April 2025: the first robot half-marathon, won in 2:40:42, the rest of the field shedding heads venting smoke and being duct-taped upright. April 2026: Honor's Flash covered the same 21km in 0:50:26.
Twelve months. Species-defining change. And yet still it somehow takes months to get a Search back ...
UPDATE: 1300 BST 22/08/26
A bot has beaten Bolt - according to Chinese reports this afternoon (just a few hours after I wrote the above!) Honor the robot has beaten Usain Bolt's human 100m record.
https://www.aol.com/articles/chinese-humanoid-robot-lightning-beats-100721000.html
There are some caveats - apparently it's had 10cm added to its leg length since its last attempt and there is a rather obvious PR win for China in being able to report this but it still qualifies as a moment. Certainly much more interesting than the Enhanced Games were ...