By JOE DRAPE
Published: May 18, 2007
BALTIMORE, May 17 — D. Wayne Lukas does not want to hear about how he is in the twilight of an unparalleled career as a horse trainer. He is 71 but still looks good in a cowboy hat and jeans or a $3,000 bespoke suit. He no longer has hundreds of horses in his charge, but he still pops up and wins important races.
Now, he is back at Pimlico Race Course for the Preakness Stakes, the second leg of the Triple Crown, with a colt named Flying First Class. The colt, a son of Perfect Mandate, is lightly raced — two victories in five starts, and very fast. Still, on the morning line, Flying First Class is a very generous 20-1 even though Lukas is a Hall of Famer.
“I’m not here to eat the crab cakes,” said the silver-haired Lukas, who daily offers up silver-tongued observations on horse racing and beyond. "We’re going to be in the mix here, and my horse is going to have a say in the outcome.
“I love Street Sense — he’s scary right now and Carl has handled him perfectly and Calvin is riding like he is possessed,” said Lukas of the Kentucky Derby-winning colt’s trainer and jockey, Carl Nafzger and Calvin Borel. “But I’ve said for a long time now about a lot of horses — don’t bronze them yet: they’re all beatable.”
And Lukas has beaten his fair share of them, especially come Triple Crown season. He is tied at 13 with Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons for the most victories in the three classics. Along with four Kentucky Derby and four Belmont wins, Lukas has won five Preaknesses, beginning with Codex in 1980 and ending with Charismatic in 1999.
Still, his last victory in the Triple Crown races occurred in 2000 when Commendable captured the Belmont at 19-1. In the years since, Lukas has watched as a half-dozen former assistants, among them Todd Pletcher and Kiaran McLaughlin, have employed his playbook to run huge stables and win races across the nation.
“I’m very proud of all they’ve accomplished and glad that I was able to give them a foundation,” Lukas said. “But they’ve also tweaked some or did things differently and are responsible for all their own success.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, Lukas, from his base in California, had scores of high-priced horses stabled from Kentucky to New York and Florida. He was the trainer who popularized equine air travel, shipping his horses from coast to coast to take down big purses.
“He changed this sport forever,” Nafzger said. “It was ‘D. Wayne off the plane’ to win in Kentucky, New York or wherever. He was among the first and maybe the best to combine the skills of salesmanship and management with the talent for training a horse.”
Lukas was forced to downsize his operation when W. T. Young, who owned Overbrook Farm in Kentucky, died in 2004, and then Bob Lewis, a Southern California beer distributor, died in 2005. Those two could be counted on for scores of horses each year — high-priced ones bought in sales or bred at Overbrook, which stands the most expensive thoroughbred sire in the world, Storm Cat, who commands $500,000 a mating.
Now, Lukas’s whole operation is based at Churchill Downs.
“I’ve got some clients coming back to me, and I’m bringing in some new owners,” said Lukas, who says his pitch is straightforward: “If you want to run in the Derby and the classics, I can get you there in three years.”
Larry Jones, the trainer of Hard Spun, the runner-up in the Derby, has especially enjoyed spending time here with Lukas. He has admired him for years and sports a white cowboy hat and a loquacious manner, much like Lukas.
“I also have a lot of healthy respect for the man,” Jones said. “When he shows up to races like these, you know he’s here for a reason, not as a tourist.”
Rivals, as well as bettors, have overlooked Lukas’s horses before. In 1999, Charismatic captured the Derby at odds of 31-1. Later that year, Cat Thief won the Breeders’ Cup Classic at 20-1. In 2000, his filly Spain won the Breeders’ Cup Distaff at 53-1.
Lukas warned that those who ignore Flying First Class, or any of the other horses in his barn, do so at their own risk. He certainly does not feel as if he is riding off in the twilight. If anything, Lukas said he is working through a midcareer crisis, one that he is in the process of correcting.
“These are the races I live for, and my record shows I know a thing or two about winning them,” he said. “All I want to do is to train horses. I think I got a lot of years ahead of me. I don’t intend to go anywhere but the barn each morning.”
