A Humanoid Robot Just Beat the Human World Record for the Fastest Half-Marathon During a Race in China

A self-navigating robot called Lightning, developed by Chinese electronics company Honor, won the 13.1-mile race. Its results and others mark significant advancements since last year’s inaugural event, where only 6 of the 21 androids reached the finish line

Margherita Bassi | Daily Correspondent

April 22, 2026

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On April 19, thousands of athletes ran alongside more than 100 humanoid robots in the 2026 Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon. A five-and-a-half-foot-tall, self-navigating android called Lightning ended up squashing the competition, winning the entire championship and even beating the human world record by several minutes.

When the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area—an economic development agency—held the first 13.1-mile race last year, the bots didn’t perform nearly as well: Only 6 of the 21 contestants even reached the finish line. Many of them regularly fell, lost their heads or spun out of control.  

“I feel enormous changes this year,” Sun Zhigang, who watched both races, tells the Associated Press. “It’s the first time robots have surpassed humans, and that’s something I never imagined.”

This year’s half-marathon involved two parallel lanes—one for humans and one for both self-navigating and remote-controlled robots. Race officials weighed performances by the two types of technologies differently, favoring autonomous navigation, according to the state-run China Global Television Network. So, while a remote-controlled robot technically finished the race first in 48 minutes and 19 seconds, an android that figured out the race path itself was crowned champion with a time of 50 minutes and 26 seconds.

Lightning won despite crashing into a barricade and falling over during the last stretch of the race, per the New York Times’ Adeel Hassan, after which humans helped it pick itself back up.

Both speedy bots were developed by Chinese smart device maker Honor. They far surpassed last year’s quickest robot time of 2 hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds, achieved by Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center’s android Tiangong Ultra. They also left this year’s human runners in the dust. Zhao Haijie was the fastest man with a race time of 1 hour, 7 minutes and 47 seconds, and Wang Qiaoxia was the fastest woman at 1 hour, 18 minutes 6 seconds, according to a statement.

Most impressively, however, the two Honor robots surpassed the half-marathon world record of 57 minutes and 20 seconds, earned by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo during a race in Lisbon last month.

“The result brings robots closer than ever to matching elite human endurance,” writes the China Global Television Network.

Honor designed Lightning to resemble elite human athletes, Du Xiaodi, a test development engineer at the company, tells the AP. The bot has lengthy legs at about three feet long and a liquid-cooling system created mostly in-house.

“Looking ahead, some of these technologies might be transferred to other areas,” he tells CBS News’ Simon Ellery. “It’s similar to how the automotive industry initially developed through competitions.”

Roboticist Alan Fern, however, isn’t jumping to conclusions. He believes the race’s outcomes reflect current Chinese robot hardware manufacturing more than any significant scientific advancement.

“A robot winning a half-marathon may attract attention and impress a few investors, but the harder question is how that capability translates into productivity and, ultimately, profitability,” says Fern, of Oregon State University, to the Times. “That is much less obvious.”

This year, participating robotic teams came from companies and research institutions across 11 Chinese provinces as well as other countries, including Germany, France, Portugal and Brazil. What’s more, the androids didn’t just stay on the racetrack—bots participated as cheerleaders, photographers, pacers and supply assistants.

Margherita Bassi | Read More

Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.