Late last month, the morning after the Nuggets’ game in Los Angeles, players slowly made their way into a hotel ballroom for a team breakfast before the team’s flight back to Denver.

Nikola Jokic sat at a table by himself, wide-eyed and stared closely at his phone while many of his teammates were still waking up. Jokic had a rooting interest in a horse race happening on the other side of the planet, which was streaming on his device.

“Right now in Serbia and Hungary, where I follow horses and my friends, they are starting to race, and I am following it a lot,” Jokic said last week, two days before the NBA season was abruptly delayed due to the global coronavirus outbreak.

Jokic’s passion for horses is no secret. When asked at his media availability at All-Star weekend in Chicago what aspect of life he regards to be an all-star outside of basketball, he said, “Horse racing.” Well, I’m a horse racing aficionado.”

Jokic’s interest in that sport dates back almost as far as his connection to basketball. Jokic says he currently has six horses. He purchased his first racehorse, Dream Catcher, following his first season in the NBA in 2016, fulfilling a dream he had held for almost a decade while growing up in Serbia.

“I was probably 12 or 13 when I got into it — around there,” Jokic told The Athletic in a recent interview about his main non-basketball interest. “My father took me to a horse race in our city. We got to the race, and I said, ‘I kinda like this.'”

Jokic quickly realised that the father of one of his friends on the youth basketball team he was playing on at the time was a racehorse trainer. So Jokic’s father took his son to the man’s stable for a closer look.

“And I just fell in love with the horses,” Jokic explained.

That old teammate now works in the horse racing industry, and Denver’s All-Star centre spends much of his free time chatting to him about the intricacies of the sport. Jokic’s interest in horse racing was not solely motivated by the competition. More than that, it is about a connection with the animal, which has long provided Jokic with a sense of tranquilly.

“I just enjoy being around them and seeing their different characteristics,” Jokic told the crowd. “When they work out, you can tell that they are really similar to us. They are athletes and sprinters. “They are magnificent creatures.”

Gary Harris, Jokic’s teammate since the centre joined the Nuggets in 2015, had the opportunity to visit him in Serbia two years ago as part of a Basketball Without Borders event in Belgrade. When the training was over, Harris and Jokic travelled to his hometown of Sombor, about 115 miles northwest of the city.

“Do you know how you can tell if someone truly loves something? “You can see that in his relationships with horses,” Harris explained. “It’s just a calming feeling that you can see.”

Jokic became so fascinated by animals following his first trip to attend a horse racing in Sombor that he informed his father he wanted his own horse.

“But we didn’t have that much money,” Jokic explained. “Now I can buy a horse.”

That first horse was Dream Catcher, and he rapidly became Jokic’s pride and pleasure. Many summer days in Serbia are spent at the stables, where his godfather cares for his horses by bathing, walking, and occasionally riding behind them. Jokic had a stint as a jockey on the harness racing circuit in his youth — he once finished fourth, he admitted in an interview with Slam Magazine — but it didn’t take long for him to realise his expanding frame was better suited to a basketball court than a racecourse.