J'den Cox announced today on social media that he is officially joining the Ohio-RTC.

I’m so excited to partner with Ohio State RTC as a part of my prep for Olympic Trials!!! I can’t wait to see how we both grow from this experience in the sport we love. Thank you for the opportunity. @wrestlingbucks #always #looking #to #get #better #BlessedAndGrateful

— J'den Cox (@MATrix_8692) December 20, 2019

Cox had been training at the Olympic & Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. J'den will continue training to make his second Olympic team, now as a member of the Ohio-RTC.

J'den hasn't announced which weight he will go on his #Trek2Tokyo. Cox won a bronze medal at 86kg in Rio; however, that was before UWW changed to same-day weigh-ins. Whether he goes 86 or 97, Cox will add four world and Olympic medals to this list of accolades in the bracket. 

Cox’s tweet followed on his comments to Bader in November that he would start training periodically at the Ohio RTC inside Ohio State’s new Jennings Wrestling Facility. The three-time NCAA champion spent the better part of the past two seasons training with the young wrestlers in the Olympic Training Center's Elite Accelerator Program at the OTC's Colorado Springs campus – young wrestlers with the potential to be world-class talent, such as incoming Buckeye commitment Anthony Echemendia.

As to his relationship with Ohio State, Cox said it was to his advantage to make Columbus another place he goes to get better in search of Olympic Gold:

Ohio State, they got the bodies. Don’t get me wrong, I love working with this program here with Colorado Springs with the OTC with the EAP guys, but I also know that I need to feel a senior-level athlete, I need to feel a man’s power, a man’s speed, a senior-level mindset on the mat. 

So, [Ohio State] opened a door for me to come in and work out with their guys. It can benefit me, because there are a lot of dead periods here. If I can continue to roll around with high-caliber athletes and continue to grow, then I’m going to take advantage of that.

Cox was clear at the time that he is not moving to Columbus and would begin training at the Jennings sometime after Christmas. He was extremely complimentary of Buckeye and RTC coach Tervel Dlagnev; the two worked together closely as 2016 Olympic teammates.

“Tervel has been awesome,” Cox said. “We were on the Olympic team in 2016 together, so I was able to pick his mind there and talk to him a lot. And throughout his career, he’s coached with Snyder so he’s always been around, so being able to still keep that friendship and talk things out, with technique and different situations. There was a camp this last year, and for 30-45 minutes we talked and worked on positions together that we thought were weird or funky and tried to work through them, and it was me, Tervel, and Snyder.

For the Buckeye upperweights – Chase Singletary and Kollin Moore, in particular – having Cox in the room, even if only a few days at a time, is an obvious advantage and helps fill the void left by not having Snyder as a training partner any longer. For an RTC that just added prospective Canadian Olympic-teamer Amar Dhesi to the roster, it’s a reminder that a program that filled 16 world team spots since 2012 is very much a place where the sport’s elite want to train.

Andy Vance contributed to this article.