SOMETHING pretty remarkable happened at Santa Anita in California on Saturday. On a card featuring five Grade 1s, one of the winners ran astonishingly fast, and that winner was a two-year-old.

The unbeaten Bolt d’Oro took the Frontrunner Stakes – won by the likes of American Pharoah and Nyquist by workmanlike margins in recent years – by almost eight lengths and in a time which was 2.78s faster than the Chandelier Stakes won by the unbeaten 116-rated Moonshine Memories and 0.80s faster than the Zenyatta Stakes won by 124-rated three-year-old Paradise Woods.

Short of something odd happening prior to the Frontrunner – such as a significant weather change or major track maintenance, neither of which has been claimed – Bolt d’Oro’s time simply has to be viewed as exceptional.

My own calculations put it at 127 on a European scale, which has the aforementioned Paradise Woods on only about 100 and Moonshine Memories (now favourite for the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies) on a miserly 87. It should be acknowledged that it could be less – but not a lot less – judged on a comparison with the time posted by a colt called Mourinho in winning a six-furlong Maiden Special Weight easily near the beginning of the card.

Some attempts to play down the performance lack credibility. Andrew Beyer, who compiles speed figures for Daily Racing Form, justified rating Bolt D’Oro five points below Paradise Woods on the grounds that having it the other way round, as the evidence suggests it should be, was “implausible”.

If your theory does not fit the facts, then I suggest you change your theory, not the other way round.

Either way, Bolt d’Oro looks special – even Beyer has him as easily fastest two-year-old in North America to date – and his finishing speed of 97.1%, compared to the course-and-distance par of 96.0%, suggests he can run a bit faster still.