That completely depends on what you’re doing. If you’re doing tasks that python can completely offload to some highly optimised library written in C/C++/Fortran, then yes. However at that point you’re not really comparing Python to C anymore, but rather your C implementation to whatever library you used.
A fair comparison is to compare pure python to pure C, in which case you need to mess up the C-code pretty bad if Python is to stand a chance.
100 % agree here. If you’re testing an actual use-case, it’s fair to compare realistic python to realistic C. However, I would argue that at that point you’re no longer benchmarking Python vs. C as languages, but Python vs. C for that particular use-case.