Bolt d'Oro ran 1 1/16 miles on a fast Santa Anita dirt track in 1:43.54 winning the FrontRunner Stakes on Saturday at Santa Anita by 7 3/4 lengths. It was a fast time - really fast. The FrontRunner, for 2-year-olds, was race 8. Paradise Woods, the Grade 1-winning 3-year-old filly, had won race 5, the Zenyatta Stakes, by 5 1/4 lengths, going the same 1 1/16 miles in 1:44.34.

So, when the Beyer Speed Figures for the card came out Sunday, many were surprised to see Paradise Woods get a 105 Beyer, while Bolt d'Oro was assigned a 100. There was no change in the weather between the races, and, in fact, the folks making the figures are not even suggesting they needed to use a split variant to calculate the Beyers for the Saturday card at Santa Anita.

The problem with taking Bolt d'Oro's Beyer figure at face value, said Andy Beyer, is that the number seemed implausible from two angles.

"If we were to take Bolt d’Oro’s time at face value, he would equal the fastest Beyer Speed Figure by a 2-year-old in the last 25 years," Beyer wrote in an email Sunday.

"Is that possible? Certainly," Beyer wrote. "Bolt d’Oro is well-bred, lightly raced and undefeated. We have no way of knowing how good he might be.

"But if Bolt d’Oro ran a 113, the colts finishing 2-3-4 would have earned figures of 100, 96 and 91. Each of the top four finishers would have improved between 16 and 28 points over his previous career best. My experience in making figures tells me that such a scenario is almost unbelievable."

Bolt d'Oro himself ran figures of 77 and 85 in his first two starts. Even a jump to a 100, the highest 2-year-old figure of 2017 by eight points, is considerable.

"Whenever we assign a speed figure in this fashion, we monitor the subsequent performances of the horses in the field," wrote Beyer. "If our initial figure was wrong, we will change it retroactively. After the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile is run on Nov. 4, we will have a better gauge of Bolt d’Oro and the colts who were behind him Saturday."