LOUISVILLE, Ky. – The first thing that happens when someone breeds a Thoroughbred racehorse is they wait. It will take at least two years, bare minimum, from the time a foal hits the ground until it races. Buy a yearling, in September, say, and months and months of waiting still lie ahead. And after all that waiting, how many owners and breeders in an age of instant gratification want to wait some more, while a horse figures out how to race, how to win?Among the 20 horses in the main body of the 150th Kentucky Derby, 10 won their career debut. Four more won their second start. Starting with Bob Baffert’s first Derby winner, Silver Charm in 1997, 11 Derby winners captured their debut, 10 more their second start.One trainer, Bill Mott, races horses that buck the trend. Country House, placed first via disqualification in the 2019 Derby, won for the first time in his third start. Resilience, Mott’s entrant this year, lost his first three races. Country House finished ninth, beaten more than 12 lengths in his debut. Resilience was sixth last summer at Saratoga, more than 23 lengths away from first-start success.“I guess I’m the oddball, aren’t I?” Mott said.Not an oddball – an oldhead. Mott started training on his own in 1977, near the end of an era when useful defeats often were built into the greater project of developing a young horse. Time, on the Thoroughbred calendar, once flowed more slowly. Now, few are willing to wait. No one would suggest Mott is anything but a master horseman, yet in a Hall of Fame career spanning more than 45 years, Mott has run only a dozen in the Derby. Mott prizes patience over pushing an unraced horse. Thus, many of the best young Derby prospects wind up elsewhere when sent from farm to racetrack.“It’s always nice to win first time out if you see a horse doing it easily. By the same token, you can’t force them. It can take time for them to mature, to do it on their own. Sometimes you just keep training them, keep them fit, and wait,” Mott said.Resilience, a sightly Into Mischief colt owned by Emily Bushnell and Ric Waldman, floats over the Churchill track, confident and poised. He has been a project, though one Mott always held in high regard – perhaps even more so than he’ll let on publicly. He has gotten to the Derby through trial and error, losing lesser races in a way that might help him land this grand one.Resilience has won two of his last three starts, the defeat a solid fourth in the Risen Star Stakes, a key Derby prep this year. Racing for the first time in blinkers April 6, Resilience won the Wood Memorial by two lengths. He’s a live longshot in Louisville. “We liked him coming in from the farm. His works were very useful, but at that point in time, he wasn’t one that blew you away,” Mott said. “He was one we felt was a little more tender, but when he was fit enough for a race, we ran him.” Resilience debuted at 12-1 in a one-mile maiden, racing midpack, never looking like a winner, fading through the stretch in a race won by the Todd Pletcher-trained Locked, who was making his second start. Locked, himself a Derby hope, fell by the wayside with an injury this spring.The biggest names in training win with a steady stream of first-time starters. Pletcher’s current strike rate is 19 percent, same as Chad Brown’s. Brad Cox wins at a 20 percent clip, while six-time Derby winner Bob Baffert hits with 26 percent of his first-timers. Mott has held steady over the last five years: 12 percent. A debut win requires a sustained string of fast morning works that some horses aren’t ready to take, though the cream of the crop can be different. “Baffert told me once, ‘I don’t try to make them work fast. They’re just good horses and they work fast,’ ” Hall of Fame trainer Shug McGaughey said. McGaughey finished second in the 1989 Derby with favored Easy Goer, a 2-year-old champ who won at second asking, quickly grasping what was asked of him in a race. But McGaughey’s lone Derby win came in 2013 with Orb, who needed four starts to win a maiden race and was beaten more than 20 lengths his second outing. “He never really did show a lot early on, and in his first three starts, all he was doing was making mistakes. After we got him stretched out and he won at Aqueduct, I was thinking to myself, ‘What am I going to do with him now?’ ” McGaughey said. “Getting him to Payson Park in December, everything just sort of changed. The first time he breezed over that track, it was better than I’d ever seen him breeze.” Orb made no mistakes that winter, winning a first-level Gulfstream Park allowance race, the Fountain of Youth, and the Florida Derby. Unable to become who he was meant to be early in his career, Orb bloomed under a patient hand.“I think the maturity factor was there. He got plenty of time, and he had plenty of practice in those races he lost,” McGaughey said.McGaughey is a 12 percent debut trainer these days. Back in his heyday, training for the powerful Phipps Stable, he won with plenty of firsters.“When I first came to the Phippses, we had a lot of good horses who were well bred, and they were fast. When you ran them, they won. Today’s time, with some of these bigger stables, you have to do a little more than you used to just to be competitive, and we’re doing more with them just because of that,” McGaughey said. Derby favorite Fierceness won his debut sprinting at Saratoga by more than 11 lengths. Sierra Leone, a different kind of horse than Fierceness, started off going one mile in November, but he also won first time out. Resilience spent his 2-year-old season on a gently arced learning curve.“His works were fast enough, but he’d only go as fast as his company,” Mott said. “It could be frustrating at times. You always felt like there was more there.”Resilience raced twice last fall at Churchill. He was second in a one-turn mile, and third in his two-turn debut, beaten more than 11 lengths by a colt named Nash, a flashy front-running second-start maiden winner who also races Saturday, in the Pat Day Mile. Like Orb, Resilience went to Payson Park for the winter, and as with Orb, a transformation began. On Jan. 1, Resilience finally won a maiden race, John Velazquez riding for the first time.“He was lagging in behind, and Johnny gave him some real encouragement. It woke him up. He finally drew away from his company,” Mott said. After Country House won a Gulfstream maiden race in January, Mott sent him to the Risen Star at Fair Grounds. He did the same with Resilience, who chased pacesetting Track Phantom over a sloppy track, hanging in for a solid fourth in a race won by Sierra Leone. Mott still felt the colt had more to give. He had trained Resilience in blinkers before to little effect, but now he tried blinkers with a more closed cup. Suddenly, Resilience became fully focused during training, and that is how he ran in the Wood, his first thoroughly professional performance. Mott’s first eight Derbies produced nothing better than a seventh-place finish before Country House came to life. Country House suffered an injury and never raced again after a Derby that has his name on it only because Maximum Security was disqualified for a foul that in no way affected Country House.Mott’s Derby win lacked the exhilaration that comes with actually winning. He would very much like a real one. Usually, he been here with horses whose ceiling was too low for any measure of development to turn them into a contender. Resilience has showed his best only once, in the Wood. His trainer believes the colt still has another level to find. It just has taken some time to get here.