It might look more unrealistic that way, because of the character's legs moving faster than seems normal - the run speed seems higher than realistic to me. In my not very scientific test, I ran 100 game units (which I guess are about 1 meter, from comparison to the human model's height) in 16 seconds, around about 22 km/h or 14 mph; which is comparable to the best marathon runner's average speeds... but it's a game, people don't want realistic as much as fun, generally.
Having said all that, I don't think it's well matched with at least most races, and it probably wouldn't hurt to bump the animation speed up a bit. I was just sort of playing devil's advocate

There is also the issue of it needing a developer with spare time and no better things to do, but you probably know that (the animations seem to need changing in the editor and re-exporting, the numbers in the .cal3d file change the speeds the different animations activate).