The Fastest Humans in History

1. The measure: what counts as fast

Running speed is measured in time over a fixed distance, and the official records are kept by World Athletics, the sport's international governing body. For a time to count as a world record, the race must meet strict conditions: the track must be measured, the timing must be fully automatic, the wind behind the runner must not exceed two metres per second, and the athlete must pass a doping control. These conditions matter, because a fast time run with a strong tailwind, or on a downhill course, or with pacemakers who are not themselves racing, does not count. The marathon has additional conditions: the course must be measured and certified, and the start and finish must not be too far apart in elevation, because a downhill course would give an unfair advantage.

The distinction between a record and a performance is important throughout this article. Eliud Kipchoge ran a marathon in one hour, fifty-nine minutes and forty seconds in Vienna in 2019, the first time a human had covered the distance in under two hours — but the run was staged as an exhibition, with rotating pacemakers and a car projecting a laser line on the road, so it does not count as a world record. The official record, the fastest marathon run under record conditions, is one hour, fifty-nine minutes and thirty seconds, set by Sabastian Sawe of Kenya at the London Marathon on 26 April 2026 and ratified by World Athletics on 23 July 2026 — the first time a marathon has been run in under two hours in a record-eligible race. The same distinction applies to the sprints: a time run with too much wind is noted but not ratified. This article gives the ratified records, and it says so when a famous performance was not one.

2. The 100 metres: from Owens to Bolt

The men's one-hundred-metres world record has been held by some of the most famous athletes in history. Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, including the hundred metres, in an era when the record was measured by hand and the fastest men ran in just over ten seconds. By the 1960s, the record had fallen below ten seconds in hand timing, and in 1968 Jim Hines became the first man to run under ten seconds with fully automatic timing. The record then fell steadily through the 1980s and 1990s — Carl Lewis, Leroy Burrell, Donovan Bailey, Maurice Greene — until, in 2008, a tall Jamaican named Usain Bolt ran 9.72 seconds in New York, then 9.69 at the Beijing Olympics, and then, on 16 August 2009 in Berlin, 9.58 seconds, with a legal following wind. That time has now stood for seventeen years, the longest wait for a new record since fully automatic timing was introduced.

Bolt's 9.58 is remarkable not only for its speed but for the margin by which it stands above the rest. The next fastest men in history, Tyson Gay and Yohan Blake, both ran 9.69 seconds, more than a tenth of a second behind Bolt — a large gap in a race decided by hundredths. Kishane Thompson of Jamaica ran 9.75 seconds at the Jamaican championships in 2025, the fastest time in a decade, and Oblique Seville of Jamaica won the world title in Tokyo in 2025 in a personal best of 9.77 seconds. In 2026, at the United States championships, Noah Lyles won in 9.79 seconds, ahead of Ronnie Baker in 9.88, with five of the eight finalists running under ten seconds. The field is deeper than ever, and yet nobody is within a tenth of a second of the record. Sports scientists have suggested that the theoretical limit for the hundred metres lies somewhere between 9.4 and 9.5 seconds, but Bolt's record suggests that the limit, whatever it is, will not be reached soon.

The women's hundred-metres record is older and more controversial. Florence Griffith-Joyner, known as Flo-Jo, ran 10.49 seconds in Indianapolis in 1988, a time that has stood for nearly forty years. The wind reading for that race has been questioned ever since — the gauge recorded no wind, though flags in the stadium suggested otherwise — but World Athletics has never withdrawn the record, and it remains the official mark. The next fastest woman, Elaine Thompson-Herah of Jamaica, ran 10.54 seconds in 2021, and the debate about Flo-Jo's record is one of the longest-running arguments in athletics. It is a reminder that a record is not only a time but a decision, made by officials, about what counts.

3. The 200 metres and the 400 metres

Bolt also holds the men's two-hundred-metres world record, 19.19 seconds, set in Berlin four days after his hundred-metres record in 2009. The two-hundred is a different test from the hundred: it requires the runner to hold top speed around a bend and down the home straight, and Bolt's height — he is six feet five inches — gave him a stride that no other sprinter could match. Yohan Blake, who ran 19.26 seconds in 2011, is the only other man to have run under 19.30, and the record, like the hundred-metres mark, has stood for seventeen years. The women's two-hundred-metres record belongs to Florence Griffith-Joyner, 21.34 seconds from 1988, and it too has survived for decades.

The four-hundred metres is the longest sprint, and its record belongs to Wayde van Niekerk of South Africa, who ran 43.03 seconds at the Rio Olympics in 2016, breaking a record that had stood since 1999. The women's record, 47.60 seconds, was set by Marita Koch of East Germany in 1985, and it is one of the most questioned records in the sport, because it was set in an era when state-sponsored doping in East Germany was later documented. World Athletics has not withdrawn it, and it remains the official mark, but many historians regard it as unlikely ever to be broken under modern conditions. The four-hundred is also the event where the 2026 season produced new marks: the one-thousand-metres record fell to Emmanuel Wanyonyi of Kenya in Monaco in July 2026, and the men's 110-metres hurdles record fell to Ja'Kobe Tharp of the United States in Eugene in June 2026, showing that the sport's records are still moving, even if the short sprints are not.

4. Middle and long distances: the Kenyans and the Ethiopians

Beyond the sprints, the records belong largely to distance runners from Kenya and Ethiopia, whose dominance of the sport is one of its most striking features. The men's fifteen-hundred-metres record, 3:26.00, was set by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco in 1998 and has stood for nearly thirty years. The five-thousand-metres record, 12:35.36, belongs to Joshua Cheptegei of Uganda, set in 2020, and the ten-thousand-metres record, 26:11.00, also belongs to Cheptegei, from the same year. The women's records in these events have moved more recently: Faith Kipyegon of Kenya has broken the fifteen-hundred-metres record several times, and the women's five-thousand and ten-thousand-metres records have both been broken in the last few years by Ethiopian and Kenyan runners.

The most remarkable distance record of recent years is the women's marathon, where Tigst Assefa of Ethiopia ran two hours, eleven minutes and fifty-three seconds in Berlin in 2023, breaking the previous record by more than two minutes — the largest single improvement in the women's marathon record in decades. The men's marathon record is one hour, fifty-nine minutes and thirty seconds, set by Sabastian Sawe of Kenya at the London Marathon on 26 April 2026 and ratified by World Athletics on 23 July 2026 — the first marathon ever run in under two hours in a record-eligible race. Sawe's run replaced Kelvin Kiptum's two hours and thirty-five seconds from Chicago in 2023, which had itself replaced Kipchoge's two hours, one minute and nine seconds from Berlin in 2022. Kipchoge remains the first person to have run a marathon in under two hours under any conditions, in Vienna in 2019, but that run was staged and does not count as a record. In the same London race, Tigst Assefa of Ethiopia ran two hours, fifteen minutes and forty-one seconds, the fastest marathon ever run in a women's-only race.

The women's distance records have moved faster than the men's in recent years, and the reasons are instructive. Faith Kipyegon of Kenya has broken the fifteen-hundred-metres world record more than once, and her performances have shown that the women's middle-distance records, long regarded as untouchable, were set in an era when training and competition were less developed for women than for men. The women's five-thousand and ten-thousand-metres records have also fallen in the last few years, to runners from Ethiopia and Kenya, and the depth of the women's fields has grown sharply. The lesson is that a record is not only a measure of a single athlete but of the whole sport around them: when more athletes train seriously, when more countries invest in coaching, and when more races offer fast conditions, the records fall. The sprints, where the fields have been deep for decades, show the opposite pattern: Bolt's record survives because the event has been contested at the highest level for so long that the easy gains are gone.

5. The marathon: two hours and the human limit

The marathon is the most famous distance in running, and its history is the history of a barrier. For most of the twentieth century, the idea of running twenty-six miles in under two hours and thirty minutes seemed impossible; then it became possible, then routine, and by the 2020s the world's best marathoners were running under two hours and five minutes. The barrier of two hours itself was broken, in a staged sense, by Kipchoge in Vienna in 2019 — and in April 2026 it was broken in a real race, when Sabastian Sawe ran one hour, fifty-nine minutes and thirty seconds at the London Marathon, a time ratified as the world record that July. The question now is how much further the record can fall, and it is one of the most discussed questions in the sport.

The answer will depend on more than the runner. Marathon records have fallen as shoes have improved — the carbon-plated shoes introduced in the late 2010s are widely credited with improving times by a significant margin — and as training, nutrition and pacing have become more scientific. The Berlin marathon, where the course is flat and fast, has produced most of the recent records, and the choice of course matters as much as the choice of runner. Some physiologists argue that the human limit for the marathon is around one hour and fifty-seven minutes; others argue that the limit is closer to two hours and that Kipchoge's Vienna run, staged as it was, shows what is possible only under ideal conditions. What is certain is that the record will continue to fall, and that the fall will be measured in seconds, not minutes.

Technology has become part of the argument about speed, and it complicates the history. The carbon-plated shoes introduced in the late 2010s are widely credited with improving marathon times by a significant margin, and World Athletics has introduced rules limiting the thickness of shoe soles and the number of plates, in an attempt to keep the competition about the athlete rather than the equipment. Track surfaces have also improved, and the timing systems are now accurate to thousandths of a second. Purists argue that these changes make comparisons across eras unreliable, and that Bolt's record, set in spikes that would now be considered primitive, is all the more impressive for it. Others reply that every era has had its technology — from cinder tracks to synthetic surfaces — and that the record book has always absorbed it. The debate is unlikely to be settled, but it is worth remembering when a new record is announced: the time is real, and so is the shoe.

6. How fast can a human go?

The question that drives the sport is whether there is a limit, and if so, where it is. For the hundred metres, the evidence suggests that the limit is close: Bolt's record has stood for seventeen years despite deeper fields, better tracks and better shoes, and the fastest men of 2026 are still a tenth of a second away. Some scientists put the theoretical limit at around 9.4 seconds, but a theoretical limit is not a prediction, and the history of the sport is full of limits that turned out to be wrong. For the marathon, the evidence suggests the opposite: the record is still falling, and the two-hour barrier, once thought impossible, has been broken under staged conditions and may soon be broken in a real race.

The most honest answer is that nobody knows, and that the uncertainty is part of the appeal. Every generation of runners has been told that the records cannot be broken, and every generation has broken some of them. The records that survive — Bolt's 9.58, Flo-Jo's 10.49, Sawe's 1:59:30 — survive because they were extraordinary performances, not because they are unreachable. The next record-breaker may already be running, in a school in Jamaica, in a village in Kenya, or in a stadium in the United States, and the clock will tell us when they arrive.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• World Athletics — All-time toplists, men's 100 metres
• Wikipedia — Usain Bolt
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Eliud Kipchoge
• Wikipedia — Eliud Kipchoge
• Wikipedia — Florence Griffith Joyner
• Wikipedia — Sabastian Sawe
• Sports247 — Ratified: world records for Kiplimo, Tharp and Wanyonyi

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• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.