Cheetah vs Greyhound: which is faster?

The two ranked speeds are different kinds of timing, and the pages say so before any verdict. Sharp's 1997 paper in the Journal of Zoology timed an adult cheetah at 29 metres per second. That figure is the mean of three trials over a 201.2 metre course with a running start. It is the cheetah measurement this comparison uses. Guinness World Records lists the greyhound Star Title at 67.32 kilometres per hour, which is 366 metres, or 400 yards, covered in 19.57 seconds on a straight track at Wyong, New South Wales, on 5 March 1994. The greyhound number is an average for the whole run, not a speed plucked from a single stride.

Two other cheetah figures stay off the verdict. Wilson and colleagues recorded a hunting peak of 25.9 metres per second on five wild cheetahs in Botswana across 367 runs. That GPS result is verified, and it is a hunt rather than the timed trial Sharp published, so the cheetah page ranks Sharp. Garland's 1983 compilation used 110 kilometres per hour after reviewing estimates from 101 to 121. That value is an estimate on the cheetah page. For the greyhound, Williams and colleagues wrote in 2008 that the breed reaches speeds of up to 17 metres per second. That lower verified citation is listed under the Guinness record and is not the ranked side of this pair.

The sentence at the top of the page is computed from those two primaries after both are converted to metres per second with the site's unit factors. The prose does not state that ratio. Nothing here claims how many seconds either animal can hold its speed, because the Sharp paper, the Wilson paper and the Guinness record do not give that duration.