Finger Lakes' Longtime Leading Rider, Now Dotsy's Trainer, Takes Up the Pen

John Grabowski, who trains the Grade I winner Dotsy, is the latest horseman invited into the Thoroughbred Daily News Writers' Room. Upstate New York racing knows him from the saddle first. For thirty years he was the rider to beat in the Finger Lakes jockey standings. In 2011 he gave up riding and took out a trainer's license. He has done well in that second career on the Upstate circuit, and a Grade I win with Dotsy is the kind of result a trainer from a regional track works years to see. Now he gets to tell the story himself, as one of the few people in the game who has done both jobs: three decades on horseback, followed by a barn of his own. Readers in Saratoga, Belmont and every training center in the state can hear from a man who learned the sport from the irons first and the shed row second.

With reporting from Thoroughbred Daily News.