Cox confident Essential Quality will fulfill prophecy in Belmont

Elmont, N.Y.

The story was brought up, once again, outside the Belmont Park barn of trainer Brad Cox. As it goes, Cox, the new wonder trainer in the racing game, was watching a young horse named Essential Quality work for the first time.

It was June 2020, at Keeneland in Lexington, and Cox was blown away. So impressed was he that he had big ideas for the flashy, gray son of Tapit. He said the horse was going to win the Belmont Stakes.

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“I said that about a lot of horses, probably,” Cox said with a laugh. “He had displayed a lot of stamina early on, and I could see he was a horse that would stay on. I was kind of dreaming a little bit. … Sometimes dreams come true.”

Cox is banking that Saturday evening, Essential Quality will fulfill his prophecy for the colt with a win in the Belmont. Essential Quality, the beaten favorite in the Kentucky Derby, is the 2-1 morning-line favorite in the eight-horse Belmont.

There is confidence because of the breeding. Tapit already has sired three winners of the 1 1/2-mile Belmont in Tonalist (2014), Creator (2016) and Tapwrit (2017). Essential Quality won the first races of his career, including the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, and won the Eclipse Award as the nation’s best 2-year-old colt for 2020.

All the ingredients are there.

“This colt is all racehorse,” Cox said. “He wins his races in different ways. He is able to sit off a hot pace, he can lay close to the pace. He is able to adapt. He brings it every time. I am pretty confident he is going to run his race.”

As far as strategy goes for the Belmont, Cox will rely on the judgment of jockey Luis Saez, who has been aboard Essential Quality for his last five starts. Overall, Essential Quality has five wins in six career races.

In the Kentucky Derby, Essential Quality bumped repeatedly with Rock Your World at the start of the race. Then he had a wide journey around Churchill Downs and finished fourth, a length behind the winner, Medina Spirit. He missed third by a head to Hot Rod Charlie.

Rock Your World and Hot Rod Charlie both are back for the Belmont. Doug O’Neill, the trainer of Hot Rod Charlie, knows which horse the Belmont is going through.

“He’s the 2-year-old champ,” said O’Neill, who was second in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile with Hot Rod Charlie at 94-1. “Essential Quality did not have the greatest of trips in the Derby and he ran a dynamite fourth. The win goes through him, for sure. He is a valid favorite.”

Cox, who won his first Eclipse Award as the nation’s top trainer last year, said the plan to come to the Belmont was made after Essential Quality began touting himself after the Derby.

Jimmy Bell, president of Godolphin USA, which owns Essential Quality, had told Cox after the Derby that the major goal for the horse would be the Travers (G1) at Saratoga on Aug. 28. Before that, the traditional Saratoga Travers prep, the July 31 Jim Dandy (G2), was on the schedule.

Essential Quality altered those plans. He might very well show up at Saratoga this summer, but before that, there is the Belmont.

“This colt has trained well enough over the last two weeks that, man, I can’t hold him on the ground until the Jim Dandy,” Cox said. “We watched him and let him tell us over a few weeks after the Derby what he needed to do. He responded the right way out of the Derby, and we’re pressing forward to the Belmont.”

Cox said he took a chapter out of the training of his two-time Eclipse Award winner Monomoy Girl when it came to Essential Quality.

“She taught me a lot,” Cox said. “The more she ran, the more she trained, the better she got. He has shown me a lot of those signs as well. Four or five days after the Derby, he looked like he was kind of filling out. That’s what the really good horses do.”

Cox said that Monomoy Girl, last seen finishing second in the Apple Blossom (G1) at Oaklawn Park on April 17, has been “chilling” at WinStar Farm for the last month and will be checked out in couple of weeks to see whether she is ready to resume training. The 6-year-old mare, winner of 14 of 17 career starts, was not injured.

“We will see where we are with her,” Cox said. “I think we have time to make a run with her later in the year. We just backed off; she needed some time off. I was not super happy with how she was training. She has checked out fine, and we just want to let her pick some grass for a while.”