By Dick Jerardi
Two days before the Preakness, I stopped by the far end of the Pimlico stakes barn to chat with Wayne Lukas and remind him of his nearly annual September date at Parx. He told me he already knew the identity of his 2025 Pennsylvania Derby horse.
In a sport where so much can go wrong, Lukas somehow always thought about what could go right. Even as his 90th birthday was just one more summer away, he was considering a long-term plan for one of his 3-year-olds.
Sadly, it was announced Sunday afternoon in a statement by Lukas Enterprises, Inc. that the legendary trainer “will not be returning to racing.” The statement was unambiguous about his condition – “a severe MRSA blood infection has caused significant damage to his heart…and worsened preexisting chronic conditions.”
Surgical options were considered and rejected as it was clear he would have no quality of life even if surgeries were successful. So Lukas has opted for home hospice care and “to spend his remaining time with his wife Laurie, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
The Lukas stable will continue to operate under longtime assistant Bas Nicholl, but it won’t be the same, can’t be the same. Lukas ended his career just shy of 5,000 wins, but no numbers can ever explain his impact on the sport he entered in 1977 after a decade as one of America’s top Quarter Horse trainers.
His final Grade I win came in the 2024 Pa. Derby with Preakness winner Seize the Grey. So the 50-year-old track in Bensalem will always hold a special place in the career of a man who grew up around horses and was still riding his pony to oversee training every morning until his health would not let him.
He changed the game with full stables in New Jersey, New York, Kentucky and California at the same time. He ran his top fillies against top colts and won with great horses like Serena’s Song, Winning Colors and Lady’s Secret. He won with overwhelming favorites as well as longshots like 31-1 Charismatic in the 1999 Kentucky Derby and 24-1 Thunder Gulch in the 1995 Derby.
Lukas won 1,105 stakes, including 637 graded stakes. He trained 26 Eclipse Award winners and three Horses of the Year. He won 15 Triple Crown races and, incredibly, from 1994-1996, six consecutive TC races with four different horses. He won 20 Breeders’ Cup races.
His horses earned $300 million even though his best years came in the 1980s and 1990s before the giant stakes purses we have today. He was a 14-time leading money earner. He was inducted into the Horse Racing Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Quarter Horse Hall of Fame in 2017.
His training tree seems endless with Todd Pletcher, Kiaran McLaughlin, Mike Maker, Mark Hennig and Dallas Stewart among the most prominent. In horse racing breeding terms, Lukas would be the grandsire of Michael McCarthy who was Pletcher’s top assistant for years. So that tree will continue growing for decades.
Lukas’s last win came on June 12 at Churchill Downs where he was stabled for as long as anybody can remember in Barn 44 near “the Lukas Gap.” That Tour Player had been trained by Bob Baffert and is owned by Baffert’s wife Jill was, somehow, a fitting final act.
It was, after all, Baffert who emerged from the Quarter Horse world a generation after Lukas to find his way to thoroughbreds and win two more TC races than the man who was once his rival and became one of his friends.
“Wayne built a legacy that will never be matched,” Nicholl said in a statement. “Every decision I make, every horse I saddle, I’ll hear his voice in the back of my mind. This isn’t about filling his shoes – no one can – it’s about honoring everything he’s built.”
When I interviewed Lukas for our 2024 Pa. Derby show, I marveled at how attentive he was to the questions and how sharp he was with his answers. I detected no difference in the man’s mind from the first time he came on the national scene when Codex won the 1980 Preakness, 44 years before Seize the Grey.
He wanted to talk about his 2-year-olds and the yearlings he was going to buy, the races he was going to win, the moments he wanted to deliver for his owners, the memories he wanted to create for the children he would invite into the winner’s circle whenever one of his horses won a race.
Pa. Derby week won’t be the same without Wayne Lukas. He also won the race with Travers winner/eventual 3-year-old champion Will Take Charge in 2013 and enjoyed the experience so much he kept returning. And it was really just his presence that mattered. He was always accessible, his storytelling as legendary as his career, which is a story unlike any in the history of the sport.
