Last week I wrote about robots having a problem. My whole point was: stop watching impressive demos , these things can’t even fold a t-shirt.

Then Beijing went and produced the best highlight of the year.

2,000 robots, 1 arena, and within 48 hours half my feed was robot clips.

Football Twitter even started using the footage as memes.

If you've been online last week, you've already seen at least one of these. So here's the full round-up. Everything worth seeing, the big stats, and the best clips.

A robot (Tiangong Ultra) won the 100m in 8.64 seconds vs Usain Bolt's world record of 9.58.

Last year the same race was won in 21.50, which is a gentle jog for any reasonably fit person.

So in 12 months these things went from slower-than-your-uncle to quicker-than-the-fastest-human-alive.

World Athletics doesn't count any of this though, for obvious reasons. It has no wind gauge or a starting gun - things you’d typically see in the actual Olympics.

The champion is a headless machine, and these aren't exactly like-for-like records.

Whatever with the asterisks, let’s talk about the slope / trajectory.

I showed up for the sprint times, but the internet showed up for something else:

The finish-line fire.

Robots learned to run and nobody taught them to stop. Clip after clip is a robot hitting top speed, crossing the line, and then meeting the floor at full commitment.

Tiangong Ultra itself slammed into the stopping mat and caught fire around its middle. Kotaku ran the headline "Robot's Ass Catches On Fire," which is just the right journalistic register.

The snap.

In a training run, a humanoid at full sprint hit a padded wall and folded clean in half at the waist.

There were sparks, understandable silence (it must’ve hurt 🥲), AND millions of views.

The tantrum bot.

At the neighbouring expo, a robot flipped onto its back and lay there kicking its legs in the air like a toddler refusing to leave the shop. No context was ever given, and none was needed.

The whole event picked up a nickname from all this.

VICE called it the "clanker olympics" and honestly it stuck.

Boxing was a full medal sport for the first time and it earned the slot.

Most fighters were the same robot, Unitree's little G1, driven remotely. So the contest was whose software swung better.

In one bout a robot tried a spinning kick, missed, and floored itself.

The winner responded by launching into a full victory dance while its opponent was still lying there.

No sportsmanship protocol has been written for this scenario 😂

Best subplot of the whole games: a student team beat Unitree's own in-house team using Unitree's own robot. Its CEO had already promised full autonomy next year and shrugged it off as "not a challenge."

So, we'll be watching.

Every team ran the same body, Booster's T1, in three- and five-a-side. You already know this one:

Robots waddled into each other, collapsed in heaps, and got dragged off the pitch after tipping over near the goal.

NBC compared it to the first day of little league rather than a robot Lionel Messi, which imo is generous to the robots.

Tsinghua's team won the five-a-side both years, so somebody has cracked it.

This bit pays the bills. (touched upon this last week too)

Alongside the sport, robots sorted medicine in a mock hospital, shifted boxes in a fake factory, tidied hotel rooms.

This is what companies care about, because it's what someone will write a cheque for.

The honest reality check: at the first games, one robot spent about 17 minutes cleaning a hotel room and picked up 9 pieces of rubbish.

A human can do that in under 5, without catching fire.

Between those four you've got a working map of China's humanoid industry. Nobody was chasing medals here. They were chasing purchase orders, and the organiser said as much.

A month ago nobody outside the robotics world was talking about humanoid robots, then Beijing put 2,000 of them in an arena, and the whole internet lost it.

Football Twitter turned the soccer pile-ups into reaction memes and the boxing dance ended up on pages that post nothing but Premier League content.

That wave will fade and robots will go back to being a niche topic.

But the 100m went from 21 seconds to under 9 in a single year, and 2025 to 2026 was the early part of the curve.

I highlighted the hand problem last week and that the demos are ahead of the product.

But pretending a robot sprinting past Bolt's record inside 12 months of learning to jog doesn't make me nervous would be dishonest.

Excited. Equally terrified. Mostly looking forward to it.

The robots aren't coming for your job this week. They did just hold their first olympics, though, and they might be back next August.

Until then,
Vaibhav 🤝

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