There are striking visual similarities between human and animal movements, especially when it comes to athletics. Though athletes first competed in the Olympic Games nearly 3,000 years ago, animals have competed before humans even roamed the Earth. With the peril of natural selection looming incessantly over the animal kingdom, every day is a competition for survival.
Competitors in an Olympic Triathlon traverse roads and waterways in a 51.5 km race. Cue eye roll from the wildebeest, whose 40,000 km migration takes place over a perilous seven months.
Sprinter vs. cheetah is a familiar match-up, but try as humans might to reach the cheetah’s dynamite speeds, there’s just no mimicking this animal’s 0-60 mph in 3 seconds acceleration.
In the Olympic Clean and Jerk category, top athletes can lift an average of 2.36 times their own weight. That’s just crumbs to an ant — literally. Morsels of food can weight 20-100 times an ant’s own weight, but they carry them with ease.
An arrow flying from an archer’s bow can reach 320 km/h. But scientists are fascinated by a fellow archer’s technique: The chameleon’s ability to catapult its tongue at 6 m/s is the subject of avid study.
While Olympic swimmers appear to be built for water, animals with fins have the advantage. Dolphins can reach speeds of 32 km/h — pretty much impossible for a human sans engine.
The parallels between Olympic athletics and animal movement are mesmerizing, but after several millennia of practice animals have something to teach even our greatest athletes.
Gear up for a summer of sport with even more Olympic data: To see the 10 most popular sports by image and footage searches, the fastest growing Olympic sports by country, a numerical breakdown of the gargantuan efforts that go into producing the Olympics, and more, check out Shutterstock’s 2016 Olympic Sports Trends Infographic.