Originally posted by lft4ded
The interesting thing about this fight IIRC is that Thor's speed was augmented to the point that Gladiator had to move at super-speed to keep up (I think he said something about barely being able to make the out at the edge of his vision, and we know how fast Gladiator is), and as you noted, that fight was virtually even until Sharon broke it up. Now in a regular fight where Thor's speed isn't augmented...
Sort of.
It wasn't exactly that Thor's speed was augmented, though. The Shi'ar galaxy was under a time dilation effect, so time was moving extremely slowly. Reed made devices that put Thor and the FF outside the influence, so they were unaffected by the time dilation effect.
They spent two weeks on the Shi'ar planet working while the whole world appeared to be frozen. Even ships in the sky seemed to be stuck in place. In reality, they were just moving very, very slowly because time was slowed to such a degree.
Eventually, Gladiator returned from a mission at the edge of the empire, and as he approached the planet he noticed figures moving seemingly at superspeed, at the edge of his vision. To him, the time dilation effect wasn't noticeable because he was affected by it just as the rest of the world. He then used his hyperspeed to match Thor and the FF's proportionate rate of speed relative to the dilated flow of time.
So, basically, Gladiator spent the entire issue operating at his interstellar hyperspeed like it was a walk in the park. He fought Thor, helped the FF stockpile weapons, and eventually carried a giant starship full of weapons and threw it at Galactus--all a fraction of a second.
Were he to use his fully combat-capable hyperspeed in a fight when Thor isn't operating under a different flow of time, there's no way Thor would ever know he was in a fight. Gladiator could punch him, read the New York Times, kick him, take his spaceship to Mike's Carwash, punch him again, bang Jessica Biel, and then come back to finish the job, and neither Thor nor Biel would know what hit 'em.
