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Usain Bolt is known as the fastest man in history, but where does he rank when compared to fastest land animals like a Cheetah? Also, can humans be redesigned to be as fast as animals?
What is the maximum speed a human can run compared to the fastest land animals? Or better still, where does the fastest man in history Usain Bolt rank when placed alongside the fastest land animals?
So far, the fastest any human has run is about 27½ miles per hour, a speed reached (briefly) by the legendary sprinter Bolt just after the midpoint of his 100m World Record of 9.58s set in 2009.
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Meanwhile, the fastest land animal on earth, the cheetah, is capable of running a top speed of about 50 miles per hour and has evolved specialized adaptations for speed, including a light build, long thin legs, and a long tail.
While human speed is affected by many factors, which vary greatly throughout race and population, animal speed can be attributed to their quadrupled legs they can quickly rearrange while still leaving time to push off from the ground.
Here's a video derivation of the distance covered (500 meters) by the fastest animals on land compared to Bolt.
1 - Cheetah - 113 km/h in 16 seconds
2 - Antelope - 88 km/h in 20.5 seconds
3 - Lion - 80 km/h in 22.5 seconds
4 - Ostrich - 64 km/h in 28.1 seconds
5 - Grey Wolf - 56 km/h in 32.1 seconds
6 - Jackrabbit - 48km/h in 37.5 seconds
7 - Mountain Goat - 48km/h in 37.5 seconds
8 - Usain Bolt - 36km/h in 50 seconds
How can humans be redesigned to run faster than animals?
Peter G. Weyand, a biomechanics researcher and physiologist at Southern Methodist University and one of the authors of the 2010 study, said that human running speed is limited because of time spent in the air for most of the strides taken. During the brief moments that human feet touch the ground, they exert a lot of force.
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“If I have to point to one mechanical limit for bipedal runners, from all the work that we’ve done, it’s the minimum period of foot ground contact,” he said in a 2020 interview with nytimes.com.
“A human who’s really fast, like Usain Bolt, is on the ground roughly 42 or 43 percent of the total stride time. But for a fast-running quadruped” — a cheetah, a horse — “it’s two-thirds of the stride time.”
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During the brief period of ground contact, the legs must push forward and upward to support our body weight. That’s a lot of force to exert in a short time — and it’s why humans can skate faster than they run.
So how can humans be redesigned to run faster? - longer legs, really wide hips, extra legs, or extra knees?
“Adding more knees is probably the trickiest one,” said Dr Weyand “If you were designing robots or whatever, of the options you included, I think that’s probably the least likely,” he said. “That and the wider hips.”
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However, longer legs might help, he added; it is one reason ostriches run faster than humans. But the best option would be more legs for more on the ground most of the time, like a quadruped.
“The key thing is having more of the total stride time be grounded,” Dr. Weyand added. “It’s really that physical principle that’s all-important, from everything we’ve done — devices, quadrupeds, bipeds, artificial limbs. That comes through every time.”
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