Brad Cox breaks single-season earnings mark for trainer
Brad Cox, a leading contender for the Eclipse Award for outstanding trainer, broke the single-season earnings mark set by Chad Brown in 2019 on Friday when 2-year-old In Dreams won a $100,000 allowance race at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark.
With the win, worth $60,000, Cox has total earnings of $31,135,781 with two weeks of racing left in the year. Cox edged closer to the record in the fifth race at Oaklawn, when his 2-year-old Mariah’s Fortune earned $50,400 with a win in a maiden special race.
Brown set the single-season record two years ago when he earned $31,112,144, with 222 winners from 823 starts. Brown was awarded the Eclipse for outstanding trainer that year, his fourth in a row.
Cox has finished within the top 10 of trainers by earnings for the past four years. He won the Eclipse Award for outstanding trainer last year.
Although Cox can still pad his statistics through the end of 2021, it’s no sure thing that he will end the year as the highest-earning trainer. Steve Asmussen, a two-time Eclipse Award trainer, had earnings of $30.59 million going into Friday’s racing and will likely break Brown’s old record by the end of the year as well. Both Cox and Asmussen have multiple horses entered on Friday night for a slate of stakes races at Remington Park in Oklahoma.
Asmussen has started more than double the number of horses as Cox this year and had won 444 races going into Friday, compared to Cox’s 256 wins (including the two wins at Oaklawn on Friday). In the past decade, Asmussen’s stable has ranked first by wins three times, in 2020, 2013, and 2011, whereas Cox has only made the top 10 by wins twice over that same timeframe.
Purse records have been easier to break over the past decade due to the rapid growth in average purses in the U.S. because of rich subsidies provided by casinos and a consolidation in the racing industry that has led to fewer races being held and more horses being distributed to fewer trainers. Over the past decade, Asmussen’s number of starts have climbed from 1,681 in 2011 to 2,278 in 2020. Cox had 160 starts in 2011 and 903 in 2020.