Norihiro Yokoyama

Norihiro Yokoyama, born in Tokyo in 1968, is one of those athletes whose career reads like a quiet argument against the idea that sport belongs only to the young. As of 2024 he was the oldest jockey in Japan to have won a Grade I race — the sport's top tier — and that single line carries more weight than a page of statistics. Horse racing is unforgiving in a very physical way: weight, reflexes, nerve, the willingness to sit inches from disaster at forty miles an hour. Doing that into your fifties is one thing. Still winning the biggest races is another entirely. What I find interesting about Yokoyama is that he has never been a safe, consensus rider. Japanese racing fans argue about his tactics the way football fans argue about a manager's substitutions — his rides can look baffling in the moment and inspired in hindsight. That is what happens when someone trusts their own read of a race over the textbook. You do not last three decades at the top by being cautious, and you do not become the oldest Grade I winner in the country by accident.

Name (English)

Norihiro Yokoyama

Name (Japanese)

横山典弘

Reading

よこやま のりひろ

Born

February 23, 1968 (age 58)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Pisces / Monkey

Origin

Tokyo, Japan

Occupation

jockey

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norihiro%20Yokoyama
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%A8%AA%E5%B1%B1%E5%85%B8%E5%BC%98
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11542519

Tags

• Tokyo
• jockey

Last updated

2026-08-07

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.