this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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humans can beat a horse in a marathon!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon
That's pretty cool. However, no human has ever won by more than 15min, and every horse has a 15min delay built into their times. So even the biggest winning margin of nearly 11 minutes would have lost to the horse if they had started at the same time.
The horses also all had humans on their backs. To my knowledge, none of the humans had horses on their backs.
For it to be scientifically accurate of a comparison, the ratio of weight:human needs to be equal to that of rider:horse, not a direct flip.
In case my phrasing is confusing, to illustrate what I mean here is an example: a 200lb horse carrying a 100lb human is equivalent to a 100lb human carrying a 50lb weight.
Things don't scale linearly like that. Many things are proportional to either the surface (so x²) or volume (x³) or complex combinations of those.
Also in very short races (up to 100m) if the human is an olympic athlete, though mostly because momentum is a bitch and it takes time for the horse to accelerate all that mass, and by the time it's done the race is already over (it also probably helps that the athlete knows what they're doing while the house is just along for the ride and wondering where it can get some grass).