If There Was Such a Thing as the Animal Olympics, These Creatures Would Be Gold Medalists

From Simone Biles and Noah Lyles to the U.S. women’s basketball team and “golden boy” French swimmer Léon Marchand, there were plenty of amazing athletes at the recent Paris Olympics.

But how would they fare if competing against the planet’s animal inhabitants rather than their fellow human beings?

That’ll never happen, of course. There’s no such thing as the animal Olympiad. But if there was, here are some of the sure-fire gold medal winners.

Fastest on Land

Jamaica’s Usain Bolt (9.58 seconds) and America’s Florence Griffith-Joyner (10.40 seconds) hold the world records for the fastest human over 100 meters.

Bolt’s world record translates into 27 miles per hour.

But the super-swift cheetah would leave the world’s fastest human trailing far behind. The spotted cats have been clocked at 70 miles per hour as they chase down prey on the African plains.

Cheetah acceleration is even more insane: Zero to 45 mph in a mere 2.5 seconds. Velocity that few sports cars can match.

Fastest in the Air

Although paragliding has been tabbed as a potential future Olympic sport, the summer games are yet to feature any kind of aerial racing.

Paragliders can achieve a top speed of around 17 miles per hour, a figure that gets measured on a 200-km long triangle course.

On the other hand, a peregrine falcon cruises at between 40 and 60 miles per hour but can achieve speeds of more than 240 miles per hour when diving.

There’s a tie for the avian silver medal: Both the golden eagle and saker falcon can reach speeds of around 200 miles per hour in attack mode.

 

Fastest in the Water

Superstar swimmer Michael Phelps may have won 29 Olympic medals and earned the nickname “Flying Fish,” but he’d be left in the wake of the fastest marine creatures.

Several creatures vie for the title of swiftest in the water. The black marlin is the gold medalist on several lists, although its alleged top speed of 82 miles per hour is questioned by scientists as more of a fish story than a proven reality.

Among other contenders are the sailfish (68 mph), swordfish (60 mph) and yellowfin tuna (50 mph)—all of them easily surpassing the 5 mph that the fastest human swimmers can achieve.

 

High Jump

The world’s best human high jumpers—Cuba’s Javier Sotomayor (8 feet, 1⁄4 inch) and Yaroslava Mahuchikh from Ukraine (6 feet, 10.5 inches)—can barely clear their own height.

But the froghopper—a tiny bug found around the globe—has a vertical leap of 28 inches. That’s around 100 times their own length…or the equivalent of a human jumping over the 630-foot Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

In terms of pure distance, the highest vertical jumpers in the animal kingdom are the mountain lion and the dolphin, who can leap as high as 23 feet from land and water.

 

Long Jump

The long jump is one of the few events where humans can almost compete with animals. Emphasis on almost.

American Bob Beamon famously cleared a phenomenal distance of 29 feet, 2 and 1⁄4 inches in the long jump at the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City—a record that stood for almost three decades.

That’s around the same length that the snow leopards of the Himalayas and other Central Asian mountain ranges can routinely leap. Unless they’re chasing prey down a steep slope, a task that sometimes calls for jumps of as much as 50 feet.

 

Long Distance (Land)

The Olympic marathon stretches just over 26 miles.

While that may seem incredibly long to a human, consider the fact that caribou herds routinely travel as much as 745 miles across the tundra of northern Alaska and Canada during their annual migration.

Although caribou earn the long-distance team gold, the all-time individual record was set by a Mongolian wolf (fixed with a tracking collar) that wandered more than 4,500 miles across Central Asia in a single year.

Long Distance (Air)

Humans catch air in various Olympic disciplines including gymnastics, snowboarding, skateboarding and diving. But it’s never more than a few seconds.

But among our feathered friends are birds that can stay aloft even longer than the most advanced aircraft.

With the ability to fly for as long as 200 days without touching the ground, the alpine swift was long considered the long-distance champs of the bird world.

Then in 2016, Swedish researchers discovered the common swifts can stay aloft for as long as 10 months as they migrate back and forth between Scandinavia and sub-Saharan Africa.

While they do touch down along the way, the winner for overall distance is the Arctic tern and the 60,000-mile migration it undertakes each year between Europe and the Antarctic.

Long Distance (Water)

Marathon swimming was reintroduced to the Olympics in 2008 at Beijing after a hiatus of more than 100 years. The total distance is 10 km (6.2 miles) of open water, usually in the ocean, but along the River Seine during the Paris games.

Yet compared that to the long-distance champs of the marine animal world.

Winners in the longest annual migration category are the North Pacific gray whale and the northern elephant seal, which log around 12,400 miles each year on round trips between the chilly waters of Alaska’s Bering Sea to the warm subtropical waters of Baja California.

Using satellite tracking, researchers have discovered even longer swims by solo animals, like a female leatherback turtle that journeyed nearly 13,000 miles between Indonesia and Oregon.

 

Weightlifting

Lasha Talakhadze of Georgia (the country) has lifted more weight than any other human, an astounding 498 pounds at the 2021 World Championships.

Lucky for Lasha he wasn’t competing against African elephants, who can lift as much as 2,000 pounds.

But the true champions of animal weightlifting are tiny creatures like the leafcutter ant, the rhinoceros beetle, and especially the dung beetle, which can lift more than 1,100 times its own body weight.

Speed Climbing

New to the Olympics this year, speed climbing proved to be an instant fan favorite. It entails two climbers racing side-by-side up a 49-foot wall.

American teenager Sam Watson set a new world record at the Paris Games with a top time of 4.75 seconds. That equates to just over 7 miles per hour.

With a top speed of 35 miles per hour, the black-handed spider monkey of South and Central America could conquer the Olympic Wall in a fraction of that time.

Various species of squirrels and mountain goats would vie for the silver and bronze medals.