Racing personalities explain how they got started in the sport and offer valuable tips to members who would like to pursue careers in racing.

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Dane Kobiskie: apprentice, leading rider, entrepreneur

Dane Kobiskie studied electronics during a hitch with the U.S. Marine Corps and spent a year at Pensacola Christian University studying youth ministry and music, but a lifelong love of horses eventually drew him to race riding.  The decision has been fruitful.  In 2005, his apprentice year, he finished second among all jockeys at Ellis Park and led all riders in the 2005 Turfway Park fall meet with 20 wins from 144 starts and earnings of $282,404.

Born January 3, 1979, in Wichita, Kansas, Kobiskie grew up around horses, riding, playing polo and entering rodeos.  After graduating from high school in 1996, though, he left horses behind and moved on to college in Florida.  A year later he joined the Marine Corps, enrolling in Military Occupational School.  A turning point came in October 1999.  Then serving with the Reserves and engaged to be married, Kobiskie had applied for a job with Honeywell.  The same day Honeywell offered him the job, he was accepted as an intern in the breeding program at Taylor Made Farm in Kentucky, a spot he had been trying to land for a year.  He broke his engagement and headed to Taylor Made.

After six months at the breeding farm, Kobiskie knew that what he really wanted to do was ride.  “I had seen pictures and stories of Affirmed and Alydar in my dad’s old issues of Sports Illustrated, and I saw Lil E. Tee win the Kentucky Derby on television,” he said.  “I thought I was maybe too big to be a jockey, but the farm manager at Taylor Made advised me to go to Keeneland.”

That advice started Kobiskie on a cross-country, cross-discipline tour of racing.  Between April 2000 and the spring of 2002, he worked with two-year-olds at the Keeneland Sales; galloped and apprenticed as a blacksmith at Dale Jenkins’ Virginia Farm; returned to Keeneland as an exercise rider for Dallas Stewart and later John Ward; and traveled to Fair Grounds to work a stakes horse trained by Dale Loveland.

In the spring of 2002 at Remington Park, Kobiskie took his first shot at race riding.  After struggling with weight through 14 races with no wins, he returned to galloping at Keeneland and Fair Grounds.  He worked with George Weaver’s two-year-olds at Saratoga and then dropped down to Delaware to work as an assistant for Mike Pino, eventually starting a string for the trainer there.  In 2004 he was back at Keeneland, freelancing for such trainers as Steve Asmussen, Stewart, and Bob Baffert.

“I worked a ton and learned a lot,” Kobiskie said.  “But by that time I had to make a decision: either start riding or go back to electronics.”  His experience with top trainers and a conversation with jockey Greta Kunzweiler led to “a good word” with jockey agent Steve Elzey, well known in the Midwest for steering apprentices to success.

Serious and goal-oriented, Kobiskie eventually wants to train Thoroughbred racehorses, a goal that has led him to “take every chance to learn every aspect of the game.”  He has other goals as well, including plans to use some of his earnings from riding to open a wi-fi coffee shop in Lexington.