LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Dirt bits tracked in from the shed row, scattered strands of straw bedding, a small pool of water moating a table leg – decorative touches laid out in the Churchill Downs barn office of trainer Brad Cox after a morning of Derby Week training had ended and before anyone went through the room with a broom. Churchill is Cox’s home base. Some trainers at the top of Thoroughbred racing sport barn offices fit for a king. The man who would be king of this sport has neither time nor need for such appurtenances. Cox didn’t win a graded stakes race until 2014. In 2020, he won 30. In 2017, his stable earned $8.8 million, roughly the same amount as during the first four months alone of 2021. Cox, 41, took home an Eclipse Award as leading trainer of 2020. He won the 2018 Kentucky Oaks with Monomoy Girl, his first Oaks starter, won it again in 2020 with Shedaresthedevil, and last fall pulled a four-win Breeders’ Cup out of his ever-present baseball cap. Cox might be losing his hair; he is not, despite a meteoric rise, losing his grip. “I’m a focused guy – not that emotional,” he said, leaning back in his barn office chair. Every chance he has been given, Cox has taken and run with it. Juddmonte Farms, one of the world’s leading breeders and owners, hired him in 2017. Cox has brought it to the Kentucky Derby with its homebred colt Mandaloun. Godolphin, among the most successful operations in racing history, took Cox on in 2019. Already, he has Godolphin in position to win the race it has long have coveted – the Derby. The Godolphin homebred Essential Quality has won all five of his starts, was the champion 2-year-old of his class, and the favorite to win the first Derby in which Cox has run a horse. “We got here,” Cox said. “Now it’s time to execute.” At the sport’s highest level, Cox’s execution is unmatched. In the 19 Grade 1 races in which he has sent out the favorite, Cox’s has gone 13-3-1, a 68 percent strike rate. Bob Baffert’s most recent sample of such runners shows a record of 39 wins from 83 starters. Chad Brown is 40 for 104, Steve Asmussen 35 for 69. Running the unbeaten favorite in the Derby? “I don’t know if I’d call it pressure,” Cox said. “I’d call it being in a good position.” :: Get DRF Clocker Reports for the Kentucky Derby and Oaks cards to access exclusive insights from morning training This is Cox’s approach: Collect the best horses he can, keep things simple, work hard. But spend five minutes on social media after another Cox triumph, or even listen to the chatter among racetrackers, and you will find no shortage of skepticism over his methods. Yet so far, whisper and innuendo have amounted to nothing. There is concrete evidence of one thing: Cox eats, breathes, and sleeps racehorses. His two older sons Blake and Bryson work as assistants in the operation. Cox is married to one of his veterinarians, Livia Frazar (Cox and Frazar have a much younger son together). His work is his life; that is how he seems to want it. The story has been told a hundred times now, how Cox grew up blocks from Churchill, went to the track with his dad, gravitated to the backstretch as a teenager, dreamed only of becoming a horse trainer. His first starter came in 2004, when he was in his mid-20s. “It seems like he’s been around forever, but he’s a pretty young guy,” six-time Derby-winning trainer Bob Baffert said. Baffert expressed respect for Cox’s accomplishments. Cox has been watching Baffert win Derbies for decades, waiting for his time. It came this year. “You have these ideas about what you want to do if you get in this position,” Cox said. “You watch what other guys – Pletcher, Baffert Lukas – have done throughout the years, how they place their horses. You always think about it, wonder how you would do it, how to prepare when you’re the one.” :: DRF's Kentucky Derby Headquarters: Contenders, latest news, past performances, analysis, and more Cox hit the 2021 Derby trail with what he believed were three legitimate hopefuls. Essential Quality’s merits were obvious, but Cox was calling Mandaloun a Derby horse in December, before the colt had been around two turns or in stakes competition. Caddo River showed plenty, too, and when he cruised to an early Derby prep win in the Smarty Jones at Oaklawn, he, too, was on the trail. An untimely temperature last weekend forced Caddo River out of the race, but Cox had managed him through the spring into the Derby top 20. Trainers with Derby hopefuls weigh several variables. How many preps, and at what distances and which venues. Also, points. Try to manage a horse too cautiously and one poor race can leave them short of qualifying points to make the Derby field. “Probably back in November was when we started laying out a plan,” Cox said. Essential Quality already had 20 points from his Breeders’ Cup win. Cox and Godolphin decided on a two-prep winter-spring campaign. “Essential Quality already had proved himself, and I thought he deserved to be backed off after the Breeders’ Cup,” Cox said. “We started back mid-December with him, and a race in February made good sense as far as getting him started. :: Get Kentucky Derby Betting Strategies for exclusive wager recommendations, contender profiles, pedigree analysis, and more Cox ran strings this winter all over the place, but he kept most of his top horses at Fair Grounds. That’s where Essential Quality did all his winter training, but Cox eschewed the Feb. 13 Risen Star there because the race was contested at 1 1/8 miles, too demanding for a first race back. Cox wanted comfortable progression without asking too much, too soon. The Southwest Stakes over 1 1/16 miles at Oaklawn filled the bill. Wintry weather shut down Oaklawn for training and delayed the Southwest, but Essential Quality trained without interruption in New Orleans. When the race finally was run Feb. 27, he won with ease. Cox and Godolphin always had the Blue Grass in mind as a second stepping-stone, a first 1 1/8-mile trial at a track where the colt twice had won at 2. “You come back on a racetrack he was familiar with, get that mile-and-an-eighth test,” Cox said. “He passes it, and you have four weeks to the Kentucky Derby, a very similar pattern to last fall, when he went from the Breeders’ Futurity to the Breeders’ Cup with four weeks between.” Essential Quality had to work to beat Highly Motivated in the Blue Grass, but he stayed unbeaten. The prep season presented challenges. Caddo River, following his dominant Smarty Jones win, finished fifth, beaten nearly six lengths, as the odds-on favorite in the Rebel Stakes. Cox and jockey Florent Geroux huddled, decided this was a colt who needed the lead to show his best, put him there in the Arkansas Derby, and got a drastically improved second-place finish out of the horse. Essential Quality already was a Grade 1 winner when Mandaloun won his debut, a six-furlong sprint Oct. 24 at Keeneland. “We loved him even in his first start,” Cox said. “He went from three-quarters to seven-eighths winning at Churchill. The Lecomte was the logical spot for him. He needed to run in January, needed to continue to be educated.” Mandaloun went off at 4-5 in the Lecomte, his stakes and two-turn debut, and lost, running solidly but finishing third. Cox already had tried training Mandaloun in blinkers, and following the Lecomte loss, he quickly announced Mandaloun would wear them in the Risen Star. Mandaloun, under regular rider Geroux, traveled strongly from the outset and won comfortably, with the 98 Beyer Speed Figure he earned still among the highest in this Derby. What adjustments Cox and company might make with Mandaloun remain to be seen. Odds-on in the Louisiana Derby, Mandaloun was beaten midway around the far turn, a shell of the horse who had won the Risen Star and trained with aplomb leading into his sixth-place finish. “I thought he’d be one of the top choices for the Derby if he ran the way I thought he would, but going into the far turn he just wasn’t traveling into the bridle at all,” Cox said. “As much as you’d kind of hope to see something from the scope, some sort of lameness, we couldn’t find anything. People that have been here the last few weeks have seen that he’s a pretty fancy horse.” While Mandaloun’s connections can only hope for a rebound in the Derby, Cox emanates a vibe that says Essential Quality just will win. It looked like the Blue Grass taxed Essential Quality, who was ridden by Luis Saez, and perhaps was too strenuous a race four weeks from the Derby. Cox demurs. “I don’t think so, and Luis didn’t either,” Cox said. “He felt very confident he could have got by that horse when he wanted. From exercise riders to the jockeys that breeze him, they all have a lot of confidence.” Doug O’Neill has trained two Derby winners but said in a recent media conference call he “was probably a nervous wreck, overthinking everything,” in 2007, his first trip to the Derby. Cox? He’s just going about his business, training horses at the track he’s called home for 25 years. “Cox knows Churchill,” Baffert said. “This is his hometown – we’re the visiting team. He’s not going to be nervous.” Cox’s wife calls him shy, an introvert, but Cox hasn’t shied from the swarming media during the Derby lead-up. “It’s fine,” he said. “I don’t mind the attention. I just like to get through the morning training.” Journalists always want to pry into the heart of their subject. “How does it feel?” comes up often, but these queries don’t get far with the stoic Cox. His first Derby viewed from the stable area was Lil E. Tee’s win in 1992. Working for Dallas Stewart, he walked over from the barn to the paddock with Dollar Bill. These are facts, not upswelling emotions. Two to saddle creates a busy scene in the Derby paddock for a trainer, and Cox already will have spent a long afternoon sending other horses into battle. Finally, with the horses headed out for Cox’s first Derby, he might pause to take it all in. “Probably after I leg them up and they play ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ when I don’t have anything else to focus on,” he said.