Off dazzling debut, Twirling Aces enters deeper waters
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Twirling Aces hardly could have looked more impressive in her debut, while Battis Grove’s second-start victory came by almost five lengths, her jockey asking for nothing through the final furlong.
The two 3-year-old fillies and eight others meet Thursday in the featured eighth race at Ellis Park, a first-level allowance restricted by age and sex and carded at seven furlongs. There is a limiting factor in how favorably we should regard their respective maiden scores.
One often sees racing people referencing the established fact that horses who race at age 2 prove less susceptible to serious injury through the course of their career than those who don’t. But that is because horses who can race at age 2 do so. It’s not like American owners and breeders sit back and think, for no specific reason, “Well, let’s just wait on this one until next year.”
Twirling Aces won a restricted Churchill maiden sprint on June 3. Pocket Aces Racing bought Twirling Aces for $50,000 as a yearling in September 2024. She posted her first official workout on May 30, 2025, worked seven times through July, and then went missing from the work tab until this past April. By the time she made the races, Twirling Aces had breezed 15 times.
Twelve days after Twirling Aces had her first racetrack workout, Battis Grove, an OXO Equine homebred, officially breezed for the first time. She worked 10 times through mid-August but didn’t breeze again until February.
Another one in the Thursday feature, the Juddmonte homebred Lamorna Inn, was a smart debut winner May 26 at Horseshoe Indianapolis, a race roughly nine months after she first appeared on a work tab.
Injuries of some sort postponed the racing careers of all these fillies. Thursday, we’ll see which might continue marching forward. But regardless of what happened behind the scenes, Twirling Aces rates very highly for what she did in the public eye on June 3.
Her debut win did not take many by surprise. Workout video showed a filly who had turned in unusually strong breezes and who trainer Brendan Walsh had prepared to show her talent first out. At even money, Twirling Aces had a bad trip and steadied inside about a furlong into her race, losing several lengths and still stuck behind rivals once back on stride and into the fray early on the turn. Didn’t matter. Once Twirling Aces found her way outside and into the clear, the party was over, and while this was restricted maiden company, the race’s third- and fourth-place finishers came back to win at the same class level.
Battis Grove, trained by Will Walden, ran a winning race in her debut, run down late by an outside closer after making a midstretch lead in a May 1 Churchill maiden race. She took no prisoners second time out, going straight to the front and never facing an anxious moment while thumping straight maidens. She’s drawn in post 10, a good spot for a filly with positional pace.
The other starter to consider is Angel of Marin, who pulled a perfect pressing trip beating just five $100,000 maiden-claiming rivals June 10 at Churchill. That performance came after Angel of Marin’s mid-May debut – which came after she had worked 19 times starting in June 2025.
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