Could a cheetah win the Melbourne Cup?

Every year on the first Tuesday of November, many Australians tune in to watch “the race that stops a nation”: the Melbourne Cup.

Run at Flemington across 3,200 metres (two miles), the Melbourne Cup dates back to 1861^[1].

It’s one of the world’s richest races, with A$10 million in total prize money^[2] on offer this year.

The fastest winning time at Flemington came in 1990, when Kingston Rule^[3] flashed home in 3 minutes 16.3 seconds – an average speed of 58.7 kilometres per hour.

The highly trained thoroughbreds that compete are considered the best of the best in world racing. But are they really top of the tree in the broader animal kingdom?

As an evolutionary biomechanist specialising in the relationship between form, function and ecology of living and extinct animals, I ran the numbers to find out, comparing the fastest land animals in the world across 3,200 metres.

The maths behind the predictions

To compare thoroughbreds with different species in this hypothetical race, we need to estimate a few variables.

The first is the maximum steady speed an animal can maintain. In the scientific literature this is known as “critical speed^[4]”. At this pace, animals should be able to run around the track easily.

When sprinting, though, animals can only maintain a maximal effort for a short distance or time. This is called the “distance reserve”.

Using these values we can make some good guesses about how long different animals might take to run the 3,200m race, based on a formula designed by exercise physiologist Mark Burnley^[5].

The formula looks at the time to run the race, the distance of the race, the distance reserve and critical speed.

For a full breakdown of the calculations used in the below predictions, check them out here^[6].

Let the race begin

Let’s start off by looking at us humans. We can use marathon world-record pace as a practical stand-in for critical speed. The men’s world record marathon time^[7] was set by Kelvin Kiptum in 2023, who completed the 42km event in 2 hours 35 seconds, an average of 21km per hour. Based on my formula, the best male runner would finish the Melbourne Cup in about 8 minutes 19 seconds (the fastest woman would take about 9 minutes 6 seconds). That’s elite by any track standard but nowhere near the Melbourne Cup’s equine averages. Of course, humans aren’t even the fastest animals on two legs, so what if we swapped sneakers for talons?