Katsumi Minai

Katsumi Minai is the kind of career that rewards patience — the man didn't taste his first Grade 1 win until he was 35, riding Tamamocross in 1988, and yet he just kept going. As a JRA jockey from 1971 to 1999 he racked up over 1,500 wins across more than 13,000 rides, which tells you everything about consistency over flash. He got to sit on Oguri Cap and Narita Brian, two of the most mythologized horses in Japanese racing history, and in 1994 he had an almost absurdly good season — five Grade 1 wins, the JRA Special Prize, the Japanese Pro Sports Award, the whole sweep. Then he switched to training in 2000, promptly won the inaugural Japan Cup Dirt with Wing Arrow, and quietly kept stacking wins until retiring in 2023. Fifty-plus years in professional racing without ever needing to be the loudest name in the room. There's something genuinely cool about that.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Katsumi Minai (born January 17, 1953) is a Japanese former jockey who later became a horse trainer. He is associated with Japanese horse racing, having worked in both riding and training capacities. Born in Kyoto and raised in Kariya, Aichi, he won 1,527 races from 13,120 rides as a JRA jockey, including the 1994 Triple Crown on Narita Brian, and trained horses from 2000 until reaching retirement age in 2023.

Name (English)

Katsumi Minai

Name (Japanese)

南井克巳

Reading

みない かつみ

Born

January 17, 1953 (age 73)

Origin

Kyoto Prefecture, Japan

Occupation

Jockey / Horse Trainer

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Capricorn / Snake

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8D%97%E4%BA%95%E5%85%8B%E5%B7%B3
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11407446

Tags

• Jockey
• Horse Trainer

Last updated

October 18, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.