‘Storybook life' of accomplished horse trainer D. Wayne Lukas ends with his death at age 89

Chicago Tribune

5 days ago

D. Wayne Lukas didn't become a full-time thoroughbred trainer until 1978, when he was 42.
That late start didn't stop him from becoming the most accomplished and influential trainer in the history of North American horse racing.
Lukas' storybook life came to an end on Saturday at age 89 in his Louisville, Ky., home, according to a family statement.
He had been in hospice since June 22, when his wife, Laurie, announced his retirement from training after he was hospitalized in Louisville, because of a severe blood infection that caused significant damage to his heart and digestive system and worsened existing chronic conditions.
Rather than undergo an aggressive treatment plan that would have entailed multiple surgeries over several months and required 24-hour daily care, Lukas chose home hospice.
'Wayne devoted his life not only to horses but to the industry — developing generations of horsemen and horsewomen and growing the game by inviting unsuspecting fans into the winner's circle,' his family said in a statement. 'Whether he was boasting about a maiden 2-year-old as the next Kentucky Derby winner or offering quiet words of advice before a big race, Wayne brought heart, grace, and grit to every corner of the sport. His final days were spent at home in Kentucky, where he chose peace, family, and faith.'
'Wayne built a legacy that never will be matched,' said his assistant of 23 years, Sebastian 'Bas' Nicholl, who took over the stable when Lukas retired. '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. It's about honoring everything he has built.'
During his 47-year thoroughbred career, Lukas won 4,967 races — including 1,105 stakes races — and his horses earned more than $300 million. He was the first trainer to surpass $100 million, $200 million and $300 million in purse earnings and was the yearly leader in money won 14 times (from 1983-92 and 1994-97).
Lukas' last trip to the winner's circle came on June 12 at Churchill Downs, where he won an allowance race with Tour Player. The horse is owned by Jill Baffert, wife of his friend and rival, California-based Bob Baffert, who followed the trail Lukas blazed from the highest level of quarter-horse racing to the highest level of thoroughbred racing.
Lukas trained 25 horses that earned Eclipse Awards, bestowed annually on North American champions. Three were voted Horse of the Year: Lady's Secret in 1986, Criminal Type in 1990 and Charismatic in 1995. He also was a four-time winner of the Eclipse Award for the year's top trainer.
Lukas won the Kentucky Derby four times, the Preakness seven times and the Belmont four times. The first of these conquests came with Codex in the 1980 Preakness and the last with Seize the Grey in the 2024 Preakness, when Lukas was 88. In 1988 his filly Winning Colors became only the third filly to win the Kentucky Derby.
Although none of Lukas' horses became a Triple Crown winner, he has the distinction of being the only trainer to sweep the Triple Crown with two horses in one year, taking the 1995 Derby and Belmont with Thunder Gulch and the Preakness with Timber Country.
Those two horses figured in another remarkable feat for Lukas: six consecutive victories in Triple Crown races, starting with Tabasco Cat in the 1994 Preakness and concluding with Grindstone in the 1996 Derby.
D. Wayne Lukas, 89, won't return to training after 15-time Triple Crown winner was hospitalizedLukas' horses also excelled in the Breeders' Cup, going to the winner's circle 20 times in the annual fall championship series.
In 1999 he was inducted into thoroughbred racing's Hall of Fame and in 2007 into the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame.
More than a decade as a quarter-horse trainer prefaced Lukas' career as a thoroughbred trainer. He trained 23 world champion quarter horses, including two-time champion Dash for Cash.
The first horse to come into Lukas' life was an Arabian-Welsh pony named Queenie. He spotted it in a pasture near his Antigo, Wis., farm home when he was a boy accompanying his father, Ted, on the latter's milk route. He asked his dad to find out if the pony was for sale.
The next day Queenie was riding to their home on the milk truck. Lukas taught her tricks and did rodeo stunts on her back. He trained her to run in races at Antigo's Langlade County Fair and at a nearby Indian reservation. When he went to the University of Wisconsin, he took Queenie with him to Madison. Until she died at age 28, they were inseparable.
'I always said my career was based on one horse and that was Queenie,' he told the Tribune in 2002. 'She gave me the opportunity to go places.'
Darrell Wayne Lukas was born Sept. 2, 1935, in Antigo, the second of three children. Ted was a construction worker, and when Wayne was 2 the family began a six-year road trip that took them to highways, army bases and airports in New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
His sister, Dauna Moths, the oldest child, remembers living in an 8-by-16-foot trailer and going to four schools in four states when she was in first grade.
In 1945 the family came back to Wisconsin to live on a 10-acre farm, where Ted raised dairy cows and pigs and drove the milk route. The children went to a one-room country school.
It's the ride of his life: Meet horse trainer D. Wayne LukasLukas' involvement with horses intensified as the years went on. As teenagers, he and his friend Clyde Rice (who also went on to become a nationally known thoroughbred trainer) started buying wild mustangs brought to the fairgrounds to be slaughtered for animal food. They cleaned up the mustangs, broke them and resold them to either serve as riding horses or to run in area races.
He also tried unsuccessfully to make a name for himself as a high school athlete, running track and cross-country, playing football and briefly golf and competing in intramural basketball.
'I worked hard at it and tried a lot of sports, trying to be good at something, but I just wasn't a good athlete,' Lukas said in the 2002 interview. 'You study the game and become a student of the game, but that will take you only so far. That's the reason I got into coaching.'
After he got his undergraduate degree, he became a teacher and basketball coach at tiny Blair High School in northwest Wisconsin. Two years later, in 1959, he went back to Wisconsin to get a master's in physical education and work as an assistant basketball coach under John Erickson. A fellow assistant was Johnny Orr, later the head coach at Michigan and Iowa State.
'I didn't know him when he came to the university,' Erickson would say later. 'He came to my office and asked if he could help. He was very energetic and innovative and a very hard worker. He also was very compassionate. He would have been a great recruiter and I think he'd have made a great college coach.'
When he left Wisconsin with his master's degree, Lukas went to Logan High School in La Crosse to teach social studies and serve as head basketball coach and assistant football coach. Logan was the smallest school in the Big Rivers Conference, and students came from lower-income, blue-collar families.
Lukas' players remembered how he instilled a sense of pride and discipline. Terry Erickson, whose father died when he was 10, told the Tribune: 'I didn't have any direction until he entered my life and left an indelible impact on me. I hadn't planned on going to college; he inspired me to get my degree and become a coach and sports official and make a difference in other people's lives.'
At the same time Lukas was coaching, he was driving all over Wisconsin to hear motivational speeches by Vince Lombardi, who had become head coach of the Green Bay Packers in 1959. Lombardi became his role model, though unlike Lombardi, Lukas was unable to develop winning teams.
In contrast, he was becoming a winner as a quarter-horse trainer. During the years he spent at Logan, Lukas stabled his horses 83 miles to the north in Rochester, Minn., and drove there before and after school to get them ready to race during the summer at Park Jefferson in South Dakota and tracks off the beaten path. He was making about $6,000 a summer with the horses versus $5,800 teaching and coaching basketball at Logan and another $400 as assistant football coach.
At 31, Lukas decided to leave Logan to become a full-time quarter-horse trainer.
'I think he grew frustrated (with coaching),' his younger brother, Lowell, once said. 'He didn't have material to succeed fast enough for him. It wasn't just coaching, though. It was sort of a frustration with life, where you are and where you want to be. Wayne ran away with the horses.'
Before he got very far, he received an offer that seemed almost too good to turn down. His former Wisconsin coaching colleague Orr became head coach at Michigan in 1968 and wanted Lukas to be his assistant. But the yearly salary base for assistants in those days was about $20,000, and Lukas was uncertain when or if he'd get an opportunity to be a head coach.
So he stayed with the quarter horses. At first his stable was based in Oklahoma. Seeking better weather, he moved to Texas, first to Laredo and then to El Paso. There he was closer to the New Mexico tracks Sunland Park and Ruidoso Downs, hotbeds of U.S. quarter-horse racing.
In 1970, Lukas won more quarter-horse races than any trainer in the country.
From El Paso he moved to California to compete at Los Alamitos, the nation's No. 1 quarter-horse track. He led the nation in races won in 1974 and '75 and rewrote the quarter-horse record book in the process.
By then he was 'testing the water' for a plunge into thoroughbred racing, dabbling with them in afternoon races before competing in quarter-horse races at night.
He became convinced he could compete in thoroughbred racing but realized he would need better horses to excel. He talked his most prominent owners into bankrolling him so he could buy well-bred yearlings at the major sales in Kentucky.
In 1978 Lukas dissolved his quarter-horse stable and immersed himself in thoroughbred racing at Santa Anita.
The rest is racing history. Within a few years Lukas had a franchise-style operation, establishing stable branches at top tracks from coast to coast while he headquartered at Santa Anita. At one point he had 160 horses in training.
When the rebuilt Arlington Park reopened in 1989, Lukas was represented by a stable branch. Although he rarely raced at the Chicago tracks, Lukas sent two horses to win the Arlington Million: Steinlen in 1989 and Marlin in 1997. And when the 2002 Breeders' Cup was run at Arlington, he won the $1,044,240 Sprint with Orientate.
Several of his assistant trainers have gone on to become outstanding trainers — most notably eight-time national champion Todd Pletcher, Kieran McLaughlin, Dallas Stewart and Mike Maker.
Sadly the career of his best assistant — his only child, Jeff Lukas — came to a tragic end in December 1993, when Tabasco Cat, the high-strung winner of the 1994 Preakness and Belmont, reared in the barn area and broke away from his handlers. Trying to stop the runaway, Jeff was knocked to the concrete and sustained a fractured skull and other life-threatening injuries that left him in a coma for weeks.
He suffered brain damage and vision loss and never was able to resume training. Lingering aftereffects were a factor in his death in 2019 at 58.
Lukas felt the tragedy had a long-term negative impact on the success of the stable.
'He was absolutely outstanding,' Lukas said in the 2002 interview. 'His input enabled me to be where I wasn't. His ability enabled me to do things that we normally couldn't do.'
Lukas eventually moved his year-round training headquarters to Churchill Downs, where his horses resided in Barn 44. Just as he did in California, Lukas got up every morning at 3:30 and went to the backstretch, where he mounted his stable pony and watched his horses train.
It was a portrait of a living legend.
Lukas is survived by his wife, his sister and brother, and two grandchildren.