Chinese humanoid robots have broken records set by humans, including beating Usain Bolt’s 100-metre sprint world record, on the opening day of the Olympics-like World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing.

More than 2000 humanoid robots were participating in the event, the organiser said.

The five-day games, now in its second year, are a spectacle demonstrating China’s rapid progress in advanced robotics as the technology race with the US heats up, with 51 events and more than 1000 competitions taking place including running, table tennis and football.

The games, being held in the National Speed Skating Oval built for the 2022 Winter Olympics, opened the same week as Beijing held the 2026 World Robot Conference, where companies showcased about 3000 products, including humanoid robots.

Chinese companies make the majority of the world’s humanoid robots.

At Saturday’s opening of the robot games, the organiser and robot makers said that Chinese humanoid robots defeated human world records, as hundreds of humanoid robots marched in formation onto the field in a massive display of synchronised co-ordination.

At a 100-metre sprint, a humanoid robot achieved a result of 9.39 seconds, beating the human record of 9.58 seconds set by Jamaican athlete Bolt in 2009.

(Although, it’s not all perfect – in practice last week, at least one robot proved itself incredibly quick but not quite able to manage the stop. It bounced off padding at the end of the “running” track and collapsed amid a spray of sparks.)

In a standing high jump, a humanoid robot was able to reach 2.88 metres, well above the 0.95 metres best result by a humanoid in last year’s first edition of the games.

It surpassed the human high jump record of 2.45 metres set by Cuba’s Javier Sotomayor in 1993.

Both robots were from Beijing-based X-Humanoid.

Before the opening, a humanoid robot from Chinese smartphone company Honor completed a 100-metre sprint in a record of 9.32 seconds during a trial of the games, the company said, at a peak speed of 14.5 metres per second.

Still, experts say humanoid robots are still mostly used for demonstrations, performances and research – at least for now – and it will still take time to achieve mass real-world deployment.

Some spectators at the robot games said they were excited about the humanoid robots’ quickly improving abilities. Humanoid robots are “evolving rapidly”, said Li Yanfeng, an education worker and a Beijing resident.

“At first, I wasn’t very accepting of artificial intelligence. I was even a bit resistant to it, because of the possibility that it might replace or displace humans,” she said.

“But now that I see this development is unstoppable, I decided to come and take a look.”

“These sports are perfectly normal for humans but now robots can do them. I find it amazing,” spectator Yang Shangzheng said.

Liu Tao, who was watching the games with his son, said that he was hoping to see “the best robots China currently has to offer”.

This year’s robot games – which the organiser said has 16 countries participating, among them Germany, Japan and the US – also include other events such as weightlifting and tug of war.