At 86, D. Wayne Lukas takes aim at another Preakness: “I’m here to win!”
He’s 86, a constant presence this week in a folding chair at the end of the stakes barn at Pimlico Race Course, his mirrored aviators usually reflecting a semicircle of media members standing before him. She’s 3, the Kentucky Oaks champion, sired by the great Arrogate. But the filly infuses the old man with a dose of youthful energy, and the legendary Lukas, in turn, has Secret Oath tuned to perfect pitch ahead of the biggest race of her life.
All told, only three of the 20 horses that went off in the Derby will race in the Preakness, a trio led by Derby runner-up Epicenter, the morning-odds favorite at 5-4 in a field of nine horses. The star-starved field has prompted a fresh round of debate over the compact schedule of the Triple Crown, which bumps up against modern conventional wisdom in the horse racing industry.“If you don’t have the filly in here, the [buzz] is zilch,” Lukas said matter-of-factly of his entrant. “Let’s face it.
Few modern trainers can rival Lukas when it comes to working with fillies. He has trained 15 Eclipse Award winners as that year’s top filly, including Winning Colors, who in 1988 became just the third filly to win the Kentucky Derby. If anything, his biggest challenge is convincing the owners who entrust their horses to his care to race them against the boys.“Not everybody would train a filly with this in mind,” he said.
Once, the late, legendary trainer Charlie Whittingham warned Lukas that after a top trainer turns 55, horse owners will wonder whether they are too old and start looking for a younger trainer. Sure enough, the 400 or so horses in Lukas’s stable at any one time have dwindled below 50 and not by his own choice. Nevertheless, it has been more than three decades since Lukas turned 55, and whatever the perception may be to owners, he’s still rising at 3:30 a.m.
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