What Olympic Runners Can Learn From Cheetahs

Cheetahs are known as the fastest land animals, but research shows there's more to their athleticism than just speed.

An impala racing across the African savannah in an attempt to outrun a cheetah, the world's fastest land animal that can reach speeds of over 100 km/h, may seem hopeless in its attempt to outrun the predator, but in real life, impalas sometimes manage to escape. So which running strategy will give the best chance of defeating a cheetah?

Possible options: fast and straight, fast and zigzag, slow and straight, slow and zigzag.

The growing body of research into wild cheetahs and their prey not only answers this quiz question - more on that below - but also provides a broader understanding of exactly why cheetahs are so fast and what humans can learn from them to help their own athletic performance.

Alan Wilson, professor of musculoskeletal biomechanics at the Royal Veterinary College, University of London, UK, and his team have uncovered the nuances of cheetah athleticism. They used special tracking collars to measure their speed and movements. They also filmed the animals from an airplane and performed muscle biopsies of dead cheetahs.

One of the most important findings, Wilson says, is that their athletic qualities have more to do with speed than just speed. "People look at a cheetah and think, 'There's an animal that evolved to be the perfect high-speed athlete,'" he says. "But it's not, this animal evolved to be the ultimate agile athlete, and as it turns out, it's also fast."

In a 2013 study published in Nature, Wilson and his team fitted three female and two male cheetahs in Botswana with tracking collars and collected data on 367 runs over 17 months. Prior to this study, cheetah speed data had been obtained in captivity when the animals chased a decoy in a straight line or, as the paper states, by directly observing and filming wild cheetahs.

Collar data confirmed that cheetahs are incredibly fast: the highest recorded speed was 93 km/h (or 25.9 m/s). By comparison, the top human speed is 12.32 m/s, achieved by Usain Bolt at the 2009 World Athletics Championships in Berlin. Undoubtedly, had the Cheetahs competed in the Paris Games this year, they would have won gold. But Wilson and his team have discovered that there is much more to cheetah athleticism than speed.

Cheetahs, which mostly hunt impala, accelerate and decelerate with twice the force as horses in polo, and accelerate faster than greyhounds at the start of a race, the study says. Their anatomy plays a key role in these feats: for example, their powerful back muscles help them accelerate.

"Cheetahs are muscular," Wilson notes. "People look at cheetahs in the zoo and see a sort of 'two-dimensional rack,' but that's not what a wild cheetah looks like. The wild cheetah has quite a lot of muscle. They are much more massive than a greyhound. They have big legs, big shoulders, lots of powerful muscles - that's an important part of an athletic animal."

These strong muscles are supported by other useful anatomical features that allow them to move quickly forward off the ground at the start, as well as turn, he adds. "They have great grip strength, they have non-retractable claws like spikes for running."

He summarizes how all of these elements come together during a cheetah hunt: "Muscles work fast and powerful so you can accelerate and decelerate, legs are strong so you can exert a lot of force and redirect it, and the body is versatile.... it can turn, and you can lean into a turn." Even the tail helps: the cheetah wags it from side to side to tilt the body, and uses the tail as a counterweight when making sharp turns.

In a more recent study published in 2018, Wilson and his team tracked the predator-prey dynamics in these hunts by wearing collars on cheetahs and impalas, and in another pairing on lions and zebras.

They found that cheetahs and impalas were generally more athletic than lions and zebras in terms of speed, acceleration and turning, according to data from five cheetahs, seven impalas, nine lions and seven zebras tracked over hundreds of runs as well as biopsies of dead animals. However, in every predator-prey pair, the predators were more athletic than their victims. Specifically, the predators had stronger muscles and a greater ability to accelerate and decelerate than their victims.

In their paper, the researchers note that the athletic superiority of predators makes sense from an evolutionary perspective and also reflects their overall movement pattern, as predators hunt often because they need to hunt to feed themselves, while prey are hunted relatively infrequently.

Studies of the causes of death in wildlife show that they can vary greatly depending on the age of the prey, the environment, and the animal species; one large-scale study found that predation was responsible for 55% of deaths.

So it's not a good evolutionary strategy to assume that an impala can only excel at outrunning cheetahs. "You can't just focus all your adaptations on being good at running away, you have to be good at foraging, good at fighting, so there is a kind of balance," he says.

Meanwhile, for cheetahs, their legendary speed is just one of several athletic skills they need to hunt, but it just so happens to be the one that humans have paid the most attention to. "If you ask a rugby player to run 100 meters, he's going to turn out to be pretty fast, because if you're athletic, strong and powerful, you can sprint fast, but that doesn't mean your primary objective is sprinting," Wilson says.

According to Wilson, who is a runner himself, understanding the broader skill set of cheetahs is useful when studying human fitness: "I think if you're talking about human sport, the versatility of mixed exercise will allow you to run."

For those who want to start running, he recommends thinking of it as an acquired skill and building strength through high-intensity exercises such as short-distance sprinting, then walking, then sprinting again, and increasing the distance over time (BBC Sport and Public Health England use a similar approach in their nine-week "Couch to 5K" running program).

According to Wilson, "short duration, high-intensity exercise is what the body responds to" in terms of developing bone, muscle and joint strength, and it's less likely to lead to injury than focusing on endurance without first developing strength.

In a 2018 study, Wilson and his team used data from tracked hunts to model different outcomes. Their model showed that there's no point in trying to outrun a cheetah in a straight line. "The cheetah is inherently more powerful than you are, so trying to accelerate away from a cheetah carries no benefit," Wilson says.

However, he notes that the prey has one advantage over the cheetah. "The prey has information about what's going to happen, whereas the predator doesn't. So the prey has the advantage of knowing what it's going to do in advance, whereas the predator only knows what it's going to do after it catches up with the prey." So the impala's best bet is to introduce the element of surprise by turning around.

"Zigzag is good," Wilson says. "But you don't want to be in a situation where the cheetah can cut you off, which can happen if you turn too soon. Instead, it's best to use the cheetah's speed against itself and turn when the cheetah is close, dodging it like in cartoons."

"When a predator catches up to you and you suddenly slow down and turn and the predator passes you, then it's very difficult to resume hunting. At that point, the hunt is probably over," he says. Indeed, he estimates that about a third of impalas still avoid an attack, despite the cheetah's superior athleticism.

So the correct answer is: slowly and zigzagging. This is a consolation for those who will never reach the speed of a cheetah or an Olympic sprinter, but enjoy admiring their impressive feats while sitting on the sofa.