You are forgetting the self-hosting language implementations, all of which are quite speedy:

* SBCL: SBCL

* GHC: GHC

* PyPy: Python

There are a lot of languages written in C because when those languages were written, that's all there was.

Language implementations can be faster than the language they are written in because that language is not used for the codegen. LLVM's C with JIT is "faster than C", for example.