Thanks to the coevolution of cheetahs and gazelles, cheetahs can run over 61 miles an hour, much faster than an Olympian Gold Medal winner.

Cheetah Breaks Speed Record—Beats Usain Bolt.

Jamaica's Usain Bolt cruises to the finish of the 100-meter final Sunday in Berlin, smashing the 9.69 mark he set winning gold at last year's Beijing Olympics.

Cheetah rockets to 61 miles an hour.

Cheetahs evolved about 5.5 million years ago along with the golden cats and pumas. Lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars evolved about 1.6 million years ago.

From wikipedia: In biology, coevolution is the change of a biological object triggered by the change of a related object.

From Evolution of Speed:
The reason the cheetah evolved for speed in the first place is because it needed to be fast enough to catch its prey, the gazelle. Both the cheetah and the gazelle have constantly evolved to be faster and faster in order to survive. The cheetahs that are not fast enough to catch their prey will starve and the fast cheetahs will pass their genes on.The gazelles that are not fast enough will get eaten and the fast ones will pass their genes on. This is a constant race and the faster the gazelle gets, the faster the cheetah gets as well. Once again, because the cheetah evolves to get faster and faster, it chooses the open plains habitat to fit its function of sprinting.

Notice the diagram that shows evolutionary relationships and the amount of time since the common ancestor. Biologists can accurately figure out this stuff from comparing DNA sequences of different living species.

Cheetahs are another example for why modern human apes should stop thinking they are a big fucking deal.