Horse People

EPISODE 99: We lived Nikola Jokic's dream.

About six months ago, Mickey Duzyj — my favorite documentarian/illustrator/animator-hybrid in sports — gave me a rare gift.

For a couple years now, the best player in the NBA, Nikola Jokic, has made clear that basketball isn’t his favorite sport.

At every turn, the notoriously press-averse defending champion (and two-time MVP) signals that he cannot wait for the season to be over so that he can return to his native Sombor, Serbia. The home of his true passion:

Horse stuff.

But not just any genre of horse stuff.

A very specific and extremely old genre of horse stuff.

All of which is to say that what Mickey posed to me that night, over that dinner, was a question I had never considered before: What if Nikola Jokic has a point?

What if harness racing is actually just better than the NBA?

So, today, at long last — with Jokic’s Nuggets down 2-0 to the Minnesota Timberwolves, and his return trip to Serbia looming — we befriend The Bionic Man… christen the official PTFO horse… and head to the track ourselves to find out.

DKN/YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

WOO,

Pablo