The video of Nikola Jokić celebrating at the racetrack, trophy in hand, spread around the world almost instantly. Once again, the best basketball player on the planet surprised people with how little interest he has in behaving like a global superstar and showed just how much harness racing means to him.
As seven-year-old mare Delicious Gar crossed the finish line at the Subotica racetrack, Jokić made no attempt to hide his emotions. His celebration was so intense that people on social media began joking that he looked happier than he did after winning the NBA championship in 2023.
The victory in the 59th running of the Dužijanca, one of the most important events in Serbian harness racing, was another success for a project that stopped being an unusual hobby for the basketball star from Sombor a long time ago.
Dream Catcher Has Become a Racing Power
Delicious Gar, racing for the Dream Catcher stable with Vladimir Pribić in the sulky, won with a kilometer rate of 1:13.8. It was another Dužijanca victory for the Jokić family. Demon Del Est had won the race a year earlier, while Amy Del Duomo captured it three years in a row before that.
That run says plenty about how Dream Catcher’s place in Serbian harness racing has changed. The stable is no longer bringing in only promising horses. It now has proven runners with strong European pedigrees and hundreds of thousands of euros in career earnings. Delicious Gar has earned more than €420,000 and was presented as one of the most valuable horses ever to race in Serbia.
After the race, Jokić spoke about how pleased he was to see the trophy return to Sombor, but he did not talk only about his own stable. He would like to see more international entries come to Subotica and believes the Dužijanca can grow into one of the biggest harness races in the region.
Long Before the MVP Awards
Jokić stopped behaving like a celebrity owner who appears only for the trophy presentation a long time ago. He follows the horses closely, speaks with trainers and drivers, visits stables and asks about different methods of working with them. To understand why it matters so much to him, it is worth going back to a time when nobody in Sombor could have imagined where basketball would eventually take him.
Jokić was 12 or 13 when he began regularly visiting the stable of a family friend. He was not there to watch the horses from a distance. He cleaned stalls, fed and groomed them, removed manure and took care of jobs that could not be put off because it was cold, raining or someone did not feel like working that morning.
The man whose stable he first visited later became the trainer of Jokić’s horses. To him, Jokić is not an NBA champion, a three-time MVP or the face of the Denver Nuggets. He is still the kid who knew from the beginning what was waiting for him when he walked into the stable.
Once a Child Swallows a Horsehair
When discussing those years, Jokić has often mentioned a saying that once a child “swallows a horsehair,” he can never stop loving horses. The races were only part of the attraction. He watched how horses moved, how they responded to people, how they rested and how their behavior changed during training. He even loved the smell of the stable, although he understood that most people did not experience it the same way.
At 14 or 15, he entered an amateur race and finished fourth. His height and build soon made a serious career as a harness driver unrealistic. Basketball offered a completely different future, but it never pulled him away from the stable.
When Bleacher Report asked him in 2017 what he would be doing if he had not become a basketball player, Jokić said he would have been a stable boy. The stable gave him something that became harder to find as his basketball fame grew. It did not matter how many points he had scored the previous night, what he had said at a press conference or whether Denver had won. The horses did not know he was famous, and the people who had known him before he left for the NBA generally did not change the way they treated him.
The First Major Purchase Was a Horse
The first major purchase he made after signing his NBA contract offers an even clearer picture of his relationship with harness racing. While many young players spend their first serious money on a house, an expensive car or a watch, Jokić bought a horse. His name was Dream Catcher. Only afterward did he pay off the Toyota he had driven while playing for Mega.
The entire stable was eventually named after that horse. Jokić described Dream Catcher as a friend who could not speak but with whom he could still have a conversation. The trophy from the horse’s first major victory remained in Sombor, while the red winner’s ribbon ended up next to Jokić’s locker in Denver. Even then, horses were already part of his everyday life, not something he returned to only during the summer.
From One Horse to a Stable of Around 40
What began with one horse grew into a stable that, according to estimates from recent years, has around 40. The exact number changes with purchases, sales, breeding and racing plans, but Dream Catcher has become one of the strongest operations in the region.
His family, trainers, drivers and the people who were around Jokić long before he became an NBA star handle much of the daily work. The stable’s recent results on Serbian racetracks would not have been possible without them.
Jokić is not simply an owner who finances the operation and waits for updates from America, he follows training sessions and results, regularly speaks with the people caring for the horses and uses NBA road trips to learn how major American stables operate. It was hardly surprising, then, that footage of his horse winning and Jokić celebrating later appeared on the NBA’s social media accounts.
Learning From the Best in the World
During Denver road trips, he has visited farms and racetracks in New York and New Jersey. He spent time with Tim Tetrick, one of the most successful harness racing drivers in the United States, asking about nutrition, training and how the potential of each horse is evaluated. At the famous Elitloppet in Stockholm, he met John Campbell and helped warm up horses. Jokić was there to learn and to see whether some of those ideas could be brought back to his own stable.
Giving Something Back to Sombor
In 2021, the Jokić family announced an investment of nearly €1 million in the reconstruction of the Sombor racetrack. The plan included work on the grandstands, paddocks, judges’ boxes, main track and training areas. A neglected section of the complex was cleared, the turnout areas were improved and a sand training track was built through a wooded area.
It has not been publicly confirmed how much of the announced sum has been spent. The total amount Jokić has invested over the years in horses, transportation, training and stable maintenance is also unknown. His involvement in the racetrack project, however, shows that he wants better working and racing conditions in the city where he first fell in love with horses.
His father, Branislav Jokić, once recalled Nikola telling him as a child that he wanted to become a horseman. He told Nikola to become a basketball player first, and then he would be able to become a great horseman. Basketball eventually gave him the means to build on a dream that had existed before Denver, the millions and the MVP awards.
The MVP Trophy Came to the Stable
When members of the Nuggets organization brought him his second consecutive MVP award in 2022, they traveled to Sombor and waited outside the stable. Jokić returned from driving a horse in a sulky, wearing a sleeveless shirt and a protective helmet, with no idea that Michael Malone, team representatives, family members, friends and a band would be waiting for him. He cried when he realized what was happening…
The NBA’s most important individual award was presented to him in a place where he had spent some of the most meaningful moments of his life. That alone gave the occasion a value no formal ceremony could have matched.
Basketball Gave Him the Means, Not the Love
Delicious Gar’s victory in the Dužijanca belongs to a story that began long before this summer and this particular race. The stable named after the first horse Jokić bought with his NBA money now regularly wins some of the biggest competitions in Serbia. It has also kept an important place in the life of one of the greatest basketball players ever.
Basketball gave him the means to invest, buy quality horses and bring attention to a sport that spent years far from the center of the media landscape. He fell in love with horses long before he was able to give any of that back to them.