Also, calling it a race implies that both parties are actually trying.

The Holy Grail of energy needs to be so many things. A non exhaustive list:

1. Clean/low environmental impact
2. Cheap
3. Fast to build
4. Reliable output and able to load-follow
5. Universally applicable (geography)
6. Safe
7. Large scale

Solar and wind don't tick all of these boxes, but neither do fission, fusion, hydroelectric, geothermal, or any other source. That's why we're in this predicament.

The thing about fusion is it doesn't actually bring anything new to the table. It's supposed to be fission but without any radioactive waste, but this isn't actually true. The beryllium cladding in the core of the tokamak (Chinese reactors use this design iirc) becomes irradiated, and when replaced produces a volume of low-level waste far higher than a fission reactor does through its normal operation. And it's going to be way more expensive simply by virtue of being novel to boot.

I think we could do better than the sun if we really tried. Compost emits more energy per volume than the sun's core, there's just way more core to emit energy