LOUISVILLE, Ky. – On a recent morning, trainer Brad Cox stood outside his Churchill Downs barn talking to Garrett O’Rourke, manager for Juddmonte Farms. Juddmonte, Prince Khalid Abdullah’s international powerhouse, you certainly know through standouts like Arrogate and Frankel. Soon, you might know Cox just as well. Cox’s star has risen so fast, so high that even Juddmonte took notice, sending him a couple horses. The first of them to start, a colt named Speed Gun, won by more than five lengths this winter at Fair Grounds. But then all Cox seems to do these days is win. He won his second straight Fair Grounds training title, finished fourth at the concurrent Oaklawn Park meeting, and despite running hard all winter bounced right back to tie for the meet lead at Keeneland in April. Cox won seven graded stakes each of the last two calendar years, but has four just four months into 2018. Already this year Cox has won 86 races, putting him on pace for a career-best 261-win year, and on Friday at Churchill, Cox has the favorite to win the Grade 1 Kentucky Oaks, Monomoy Girl. For good measure, he has horses entered in seven other races on the card, as well as a second Oaks starter, Sassy Siena. :: ROAD TO THE KENTUCKY DERBY: Prep races, point standings, replays, and analysis Born and raised a couple blocks from Churchill, Cox was over the moon winning the Eight Belles Stakes with Benner Island and the American Turf with Arklow during Derby week a year ago. The Oaks would be even more satisfying. “We put a lot of hours in – a lot of time,” Cox said. “Things are paying off.” Cox is just 38 with a baby face that, despite a goatee, makes him look even younger. Cox is married to Livia Frazar, a racetrack veterinarian who works on Cox’s horses at Churchill and Fair Grounds, and with whom he has a 2-year-old child. He gets to the track at 5 a.m. seven days a week, and through the winter keeps a frenetic schedule, popping back and forth between Oaklawn and Fair Grounds. Cox appears to eat, sleep, and breath racing. It has been that way since he was a kid from a blue-collar family in the Churchill neighborhood, smitten with horse racing, indifferent toward school. “I don’t know why I was so interested in it, but I loved it,” Cox said. Cox snuck onto the backstretch here while only 14 just to be around the game. “I walked hots, groomed the pony, took care of the pony – whatever I could do,” he said. “I wasn’t old enough go get a license. I remember watching people doing stuff and thinking, ‘When I train, this is how I’m going to do it.’ ” Cox now gets to call the shots on roughly 100 in-training horses, including a division in New York. Juddmonte is a new client, and Cox trains Monomoy Girl for a partnership that includes the prominent East Coast-based owner Sol Kumin. Monomoy Girl, like Cox, kind of came out of nowhere. Cox went to a farm in March 2017 to look at seven 2-year-olds for Kumin. He ranked Monomoy Girl, an awkward filly at the time, fifth of the bunch. She had considerable gate trouble before she raced, and Cox debuted her at Indiana Grand, but Monomoy Girl, like Cox, just has kept coming. She’s a neck away from being unbeaten in six starts, and she gave Cox his first Grade 1 win with a romp last month in the Ashland Stakes. Cox said his big break came when Rich and Karen Papiese’s Midwest Thoroughbreds hired him in 2010. Cox served two stints as a Midwest trainer, overseeing an operation that was a whirlwind of claiming action and a hotbed of information for an ambitious young trainer. “That was an unbelievable experience just learning the business,” he said. “You see a lot of horses come through the barn, win with a lot of horses, and then lose them [through claims] and have to go out and replace them.” But when Midwest pulled its horses from Cox late in the summer of 2012, Cox was left with a three-horse stable. That was less than six years ago, yet somehow Cox went from 42 wins in 2013 to 204 in 2017. How did Cox rise so quickly? Why him? “I really don’t know, and I oftentimes wonder the same thing,” he said. Rapid success can breed envy among colleagues, but Cox seems well liked by his peers. Similarly, an unusually high win percentage, like Cox’s, sets racetrack tongues wagging. Cox is winning at a 29 percent clip during 2018 after hitting at 26 percent last year. Over the last two years, horses racing for the first time after a Cox claim have won 38 percent of the time, going 29 for 77. But Cox has a clean record. From 3,363 starters through April 30, Cox has only two medication-related rulings against him, according to the Association of Racing Commissioners International database – a 2014 Saratoga positive for flunixin that incurred a 15-day suspension, and a $500 fine for a phenylbutazone overage this year at Fair Grounds. “I don’t know what sets us apart,” Cox said. “I do feel like we’re really in tune with what’s going on with our horses, but it’s a tough question to answer because you don’t know what other people are doing with their horses. You almost feel like just answering that question you’re offending other barns.” The next generation of Coxes already is on the racetrack. Cox has two sons, Bryson, 20, and Blake, 17, from a first marriage. Both are regulars at the barn, and like Cox appear organically drawn to the game. “They know their way around a horse, how to read a sales catalog,” Cox said. “They’re really into it, but I never pressed it on them. I don’t have to get them up in the morning – they get themselves up. And if they never walk into a barn again at the end of today or tomorrow, I’m fine with that. But this is something no one ever threw on me, either.” No, it was Cox that threw himself into racing, and he surely has landed on his feet.