The question asks if the top speed of the greyhound is faster than that of the cheetah or vice versa. Therefore, I’m not going to go into a long discussion about the endurance and acceleration of these two animals. I’m simply going to set down for the record what I think is the fastest of these two animals over any distance.

Cheetah speed. Picture in public domain.

The first point to make is that you will see quite a lot of variation on the top speed of the cheetah. About 10 years ago I did a lot of work on this and in my assessment this cat’s top speed is around 64 mph. We frequently read 70 miles an hour but this is a rounded up number and probably incorrect.

Interestingly, captive cheetahs tend to lose some of their speed. In a test at Whipsnade zoo in London captive cheetahs had a top speed of 64 km/h compared with greyhounds at 68 km/h. 64 km/h is about 40 mph. This is well below the top speed of a fit, wild cheetah chasing prey over 400 m.

A researcher, Mr Wilson, from the Royal Veterinary College in London, states that greyhounds are approximately 32 km/h slower than cheetahs. He also states that cheetahs have been recorded running at 104 km/h in the wild which is 64 mph, the figure that I state above.

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My research on the Internet indicates that greyhounds have enormously quick exhilaration, perhaps better than that of cheetahs, but their top speed is around 45 mph. This concurs with the numbers produced by Mr Wilson mentioned above. Lions and tigers can run at this speed over short distances; shorter than that of greyhounds.

Okay, then, in conclusion, the cheetah, as expected, is quite a lot faster than the greyhound. The cheetah is the fastest land animal and the greyhound is the fastest dog on the planet.