D. Wayne Lukas and the endless stretch

No trainer slept less or won more than Lukas, who passed on Sunday at age 89.

Darrell Wayne Lukas coached high school basketball for nine years. Back then he had no idea he would invent the Double-Triple.

In 1994 Lukas trained Tabasco Cat to win the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes. The next year, he trained Thunder Gulch to win the Kentucky Derby, won the Preakness with Timber Country, and then won the Belmont with Thunder Gulch. In 1996, Grindstone won the Derby for Lukas. That’s six consecutive wins in Triple Crown races. No trainer has ever done that.

It’s one thing to take a colossus of a horse like Secretariat or Seattle Slew and run the table for a year. Lukas’ winning streak involved four different colts and three different jockeys — Pat Day on Tabasco Cat and Timber Country, Gary Stevens on Thunder Gulch and Jerry Bailey on Grindstone. Some were favorites, like Tabasco Cat and Timber Country, but Thunder Gulch was a 25-to-1 shot. In fact, Thunder was Lukas’ third-rated horse in the Derby, behind Timber Country and filly Serena’s Song. “This horse was between a ballerina and the 2-year-old champion,” Lukas said. “And now he’s a champion on his own.”

But the Double-Triple was only one jewel in the crown. Lukas basically rewired thoroughbred racing. He won 15 Triple Crown races, including four Derbys, and had 20 winners in the Breeders Cup. Four times he won the Eclipse Award as the top trainer.

His real talent was ubiquity. His horses brought home $301 million, 637 of them doing so in graded stakes. His 4,967th win happened on June 12, when Tour Player won an allowance race at Churchill Downs. Bob Baffert, Lukas’ lineal descendant in training royalty, loaned Lukas the horse, which was the son of American Pharoah, and after the win Lukas began making noises about keeping him, scrapping to the end. Lukas died 17 days later, at 89.

Before Lukas, most trainers were affiliated with one owner and did their thing at one track per season. Lucas was like a college coach who wanted to win every conference in America simultaneously. He sent his horses everywhere, every time he saw a race that looked promising, and the motto became “D. Wayne, off the plane.” At nine different tracks he was the leading trainer at least once, including shrines like Churchill, Santa Anita, Belmont Park and Saratoga.

He was the first trainer to amass $100 million in winnings and then $200 million. He matched Winning Colors, a filly, against the best 3-year-olds in the 1988 Derby and won by seven and a half lengths. He did things that hadn’t been done, but now his protege, Todd Pletcher, tries to do them, and so does Baffert, the only trainer with more Triple Crown wins than Lukas.

Baffert and Lukas were both quarter-horse trainers. It seems redundant to say they liked horses with speed, because slow ones don’t tend to do well, but what they both preferred were front-runners who could dictate. But they could adjust. Grindstone was in 15th place in that Derby, but then Bailey rallied him to hit the line with Cavonnier. The crowd, and the principals, waited for six minutes before Grindstone was given the win, by a nose, appropriately enough. Cavonnier’s trainer said he had a hard time dealing with that one, since he hadn’t won a Triple Crown race before. That was Baffert.

The two also understood that the sport needs celebrities, and the horses come and go much too quickly to carry it. Baffert will talk at length to anyone who has a question. Lukas was less media-friendly at first but then became the Old Philosopher, mellow but dangerous. Asked what he looked for in a horse, he said, “A face like a model, a butt like a washerwoman and a walk like a hooker.”

He also made himself distinctive, dressing like Beau Brummel when he could barely afford it, and making sure his barns were immaculate, with freshly painted picket fences and freshly mown grass. Appearances meant everything, he reasoned, in order to bring more rich owners into the game. But he was a stickler about everything. His Wisconsin high school hoopsters didn’t get on the bus unless their pants were pressed, and Lukas introduced them to table etiquette, taught them how to tie a tie. They were instructed to say, “Thank you, sir,” to the referees.

Those who decry workaholism as a menace to society had trouble explaining Lukas. He routinely got to the barn at 3 a.m., especially if he was in California, because he had to spend hours on the phone with all of his assistant trainers, going over the daily routine for each horse. Eugene Klein, the former owner of the Chargers, visited the winners’ circle routinely when Lukas bought and then trained his horses. “I gave him an unlimited budget,” Klein said, “and he exceeded it.”

The horses monopolized Lukas’ personal clock, squeezing out most people. He was married three times. His third wife Shari famously remembered the day Lukas told her he was going to take a nap. “But wake me in seven minutes,” he told her. Not eight, not six.

Eventually, you can’t outwork the heartbreak. Lukas’ son Jeff, his righthand man, was working out Tabasco Cat one day at Santa Anita in 1983. The horse got loose and Jeff jumped in front of him in hopes he would make him stop. He didn’t. Jeff was in a coma for a month and a half. His skill was fractured and he suffered a traumatic brain injury. He did recover, and worked in a bank in a small Oklahoma town before he died in 2016, at 58. That was before Tabasco Cat won those two Triple Crown races, and D. Wayne never blamed his horse. It was the rub of the green, he figured.

Lukas’ retirement party never reached the planning stage. In 2024, Lukas won his final Preakness with Seize The Grey, 44 years after Codex had brought him his first one. In 2014, Take Charge Brandi won the Juvenile Fillies race at the Breeders Cup for Lukas, even though she was 60-to-1 at post time.

“Training horses is a day-to-day deal,” Lukas said, shrugging. “Kind of like getting along with your wife. You wake up every morning and figure out what works best.”

You can also fit a lot of dreams into seven minutes.