For a long time, cheetah speeds were hard to measure in the wild. People who time animals cannot always catch their fastest speed, because animals do not always run flat out. So researchers followed five wild cheetahs in Botswana for 17 months. They wore special tracking collars, and the collars recorded 367 runs. It was a chance to see what cheetahs really do when they hunt.

The result was a surprise. In the Botswana study, the hunting runs topped out at about 31 to 33 mph on average, as of November 2026. That is much lower than the record. About one run in four ended with the cheetah catching its prey. A cheetah does not run at its top speed on every hunt.

A cheetah is built to accelerate, not only to run fast. It can speed up by up to 6.7 mph in a single stride. That means it reaches a high speed in a hurry. As of November 2026, the best field measurement of a wild cheetah is 58 mph. A number that big comes from a sprint, not from a long chase.

The pronghorn has a different story. It evolved alongside the now-extinct American cheetah. Its speed is thought to come from the need to outrun that hunter; a pronghorn can run fast for much longer than a cheetah can. So one animal is a sprinter, and the other is a runner that lasts. As of November 2026, the pronghorn is still second to the cheetah on land.

In the water, the sailfish got a new number. A 2016 study that measured sailfish muscle estimated a top swimming speed of about 8.3 meters per second. That is about 19 mph, as of November 2026; a tracked sailfish was also logged speeding up at a rate that, kept up for two seconds, would equal 78 mph. That is a short burst, not a top speed.

Fast swimmers tend to have long, streamlined bodies and powerful tails. In the air, the fastest bird in level flight may not be the falcon at all. As of November 2026, swifts are thought to be the fastest birds in level flight; a common swift reached 69 mph in a Lund University study. The falcon's record belongs to the dive, where its speed can top 200 miles per hour.

Words to know

• collars: tracking bands
• accelerate: speed up
• streamlined: smooth, slim
• evolved: changed slowly