AMERICAN HEART
“Nothing will ever stop me. I can do whatever I want to do – there’s no limit. If I decide to do something, I’m going to do it. No one is going to stop me. That’s just my desire to want to win and to be successful. That’s what motivates me.”
This was American racer John Kocinski speaking in the January 7, 1998 issue of Cycle News shortly after winning the 1997 World Superbike Championship on the Honda RC45.
Fast forward 22 years to Beverly Hills, California, where Kocinski, now a world renowned housing developer, is thinking through a question this writer just asked him: “John, the Cycle News quote I just showed you, that was your approach to it all, wasn’t it?”
“Absolutely.”
One John Kocinski of Little Rock, Arkansas was, easily, one of the greatest, outspoken, controversial and talented motorcycle racers. In an incandescent career which ran from 1988 through 1999, Kocinski won bookend championships in the form of the 1990 250cc World Championship and the 1997 Superbike World Championship.
A winner of 13 Grands Prix (nine 250cc and four 500cc) during his globetrotting career while racing alongside such legends as Eddie Lawson, Wayne Rainey, Kevin Schwantz and Mick Doohan, Kolinski’s WSBK World Championship – which came in the twilight of his racing career – came to symbolise who he was and what he was all about.
“At that stage of the 1997 World Superbike Championship, I guess you could say that my career took a path that wasn’t really in the plan from the beginning,” said Kocinski, looking through some race coverage from that season in which he won 10 races. “My career path moved around after winning my first 250 World Championship in 1990.”
In 1982, John Kocinski and his father loaded a racing motorcycle and headed to Daytona Beach, Florida to compete in the amateur races there. Dad and son, 14 years old at the time, had already been long at racing, both sharing a goal of trying to make it to the top in a sport they both loved.
“My dad got me involved in motorcycles,” offered Kocinski, who was born in Arkansas on March 20, 1968. “He was 100% supportive behind my racing, in terms of that just about every other weekend, we were in the van and going to a race somewhere.
“My dad, being the way he is, was going to support my racing no matter what. He’s been involved in motorcycle racing his whole life. When I was a kid, I sure enjoyed riding when I did ride. With our first home, we had to move out of there and out into the country because we were essentially
