How Did This Year's "Robot Olympics" Go?

Last week in Beijing, an event took place that could revolutionize sports history — or might just stand out as an interesting curiosity for technology enthusiasts. That event was the 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games, which ran from August 14-17. The first large-scale event of its kind, the games put a group of robots into competition in a series of athletic events; kind of like the Olympics, if the athletes required charging.

In a dispatch for Engadget, Jackson Chen observed that the competitions were, well, not necessarily focused on competition. “[M]ost teams took this event as an opportunity to showcase the abilities of their designs, while also stress-testing their robots in a competitive environment,” Chen wrote.

As Eunice Yoon reported for CBNC, the big winner of the competition was the robotics company Unitree, whose robots walked away with four gold medals. All told, 280 different teams took part in the events, with 16 different countries represented. Yoon also notes that at least one Olympic athlete was present for the robots’ competitions: boxer Li Yang, who told CNBC that “robots are easier to coach” than their human counterparts.

That said, if you’re looking for more competing robots, the World Humanoid Robot Games isn’t the only event of its kind out there; there’s also the annual World Robot Olympiad, geared towards programmers between the ages of eight and 22. Its international final for 2025 will take place in Singapore this November.

An Olympics Without Drug Testing Is Coming Courtesy of Peter Thiel

Doping is basically encouraged for the athletes of the Enhanced Games

So if we now have a regular Olympics, a version of the Olympics for robots and a version of the Olympics where performance-enhancing drugs are legal, how long before the “enhanced” humans face off against the robots? We may not have flying cars or jetpacks, but we might well get to see a steroid-crazed kickboxer fight a robot kickboxer. That’s progress, right?

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…