A humanoid beat Bolt's 100m time. Then the stretcher team came out.

The schedule is the disclosure document. Organizers had to rule, event by event, whether a human may hold the controls, and the rulings are specific. Basic running races require autonomy, as do soccer, gymnastics, the dancing events, boxing, Tai Chi and table tennis ^[9]. Hurdles and jumping events carry no such mandate, and neither do weightlifting, kickboxing or the comprehensive pentathlon ^[10]. Forbes contributor John Koetsier reads that split as an admission: flat-ground bipedal running has become a commodity, while perception at speed, explosive movement with a hard landing, and contact against an opponent have not been solved ^[11].

In the twenty work events, the scoring does the same job with points instead of rules. A robot that finishes on its own gets full marks; one driven by a teleoperator gets half ^[8]. Eight of those are hand tasks: power tool assembly, powder weighing, bricklaying, block stacking, nail fastening, cap and lid opening, box unpacking, tweezers bean picking and cable connection. Koetsier's point is that none of these are sports, they are jobs ^[12].

The scale figures deserve less weight than they will get. If 96% of entries are Chinese, the other fifteen countries and regions supplied roughly 82 robots between them ^[25]. The robot count also grew faster than the team count: about 500 machines across 280 teams last year became 2,056 across 666 ^[16], which lifts the average team from under two robots to over three ^[26]. More entries per organisation, not many more organisations.

Almost all of the event growth sits in the work half rather than the sport half ^[14]. The 100-meter time limit fell by two-thirds, and organizers moved soccer from what they called preschooler level to what they hope will be youth level, with dribbling on the move ^[15]. Wang Peng of the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences framed the change as a move from whether the robots could reach the finish line to whether they can get the job done ^[17].

Capital is still paying for the first question. Unitree's shares rose as much as 629% on its trading debut and closed up 460% ^[18], and robotics startups raised a record $15 billion in 2025 and $18.8 billion so far this year, according to Crunchbase ^[20], which is $33.8 billion across the two periods ^[27]. At Actuate, the San Francisco conference for robot builders, data vendors outnumbered robots on the floor ^[23]. Business Insider's summary of the industry holds: the demos are excellent, and the underlying AI has kept humanoids out of real workplaces ^[28]. The distance between the two halves of the program is the forecast. Sport is where the records get set. Work is where the scoring still has to pay robots double for doing it without a person attached.