BALTIMORE — They make for quite the pair, the old man and the filly: D. Wayne Lukas in his white Stetson and ostrich-skin boots, Secret Oath with her calm, regal presence as the steam rises from her chestnut coat after a post-workout bath.
At 86, D. Wayne Lukas takes aim at another Preakness: ‘I’m here to win’
They have spent much of the past week rescuing the 147th Preakness Stakes from irrelevance. On Saturday evening, they will take their shot at winning it.
“That’s why we’re here,” said Lukas, who has been bringing top 3-year-olds to Pimlico for 42 years now. “Filly, colt, government mule — I don’t care. I’m here to win the thing.”
It is tempting to focus on what is missing from the second jewel of the Triple Crown, namely lightning-rod trainer Bob Baffert and Kentucky Derby champion Rich Strike. The former is in the middle of a 90-day suspension for the doping scandal that tainted last year’s Triple Crown; the latter was pulled from the Preakness by his handlers in the wake of his shocking victory as an 80-1 shot two weeks ago and pointed instead toward the Belmont Stakes three weeks hence.
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. The filly has made this at least have a little bit of interest.”
For both Secret Oath and her trainer, there is history at stake Saturday evening. She is seeking to become just the seventh filly — and just the third in the past 98 years — to win the Preakness. She will have jockey Luis Saez aboard; he rode her for the first time in the Kentucky Oaks, sweeping her outside at the second turn and charging home for a two-length win. In the race before that, she raced eight colts in the Arkansas Derby with Luis Contreras atop, finishing third in a race Lukas felt she should have won.
Lukas, meanwhile, is seeking his seventh Preakness title, which would tie Baffert for the most in the modern era. Lukas hasn’t saddled the winner of any Triple Crown race since 2013, when he won his sixth Preakness with Oxbow.
“It won’t be easy, but she’ll make the race very interesting,” Lukas said. “She’s got that acceleration. When you ask her to move, she has a devastating kick. She breaks their hearts. … If she would put the Preakness on her résumé, it would take her to another level.”
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. “Most of these [other trainers], they might have a good filly, but they’re not thinking Preakness. You’ve got to be a little aggressive in your thinking to do that. We’ve had good luck doing it, but it’s a calculated decision every step of the way… I have an aggressive, A-type personality. It’s if doable and I think I can pull it off, I’m going to do it.”
So Lukas, perhaps more than anyone else on the planet, can be trusted when he describes the subtle difference in the racing style of a filly vs. a colt:
“If you’ve got them finely tuned and everything, they’ll go to the well for you,” he said. “Where a colt might protect himself a little bit. He might say: ‘Hell, I’ve done this before. I don’t need it today.’ I think a colt is little bit more interested in himself, where a filly will definitely go to the well.”
Lukas makes only a few concessions to age. He walks with a cane now, and he uses a step stool to climb atop a horse. There have been some health scares, including a bout with covid-19 in 2020 that required brief hospitalization.
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., seven days a week, and on any given morning beats all his rivals to the barns.
“I look around, it’s sleeting rain, and it’s 5:30 in the morning, and I’m sitting out here at [the track], and I don’t see any of the young guys. They’re not out there,” he said. “… It’s a way of life. I don’t know what the hell I’d do if I quit. I don’t think ‘quit.’ I don’t know what I’d do. I think that would be tough for me.”
Everyone, even the seemingly ageless, eventually reaches their final triumph. Many thought Lukas arrived there in 2013, when at age 78 he won the Preakness with Oxbow — his first win in a Triple Crown race in 13 years and so far his last. For that matter, his victory with Secret Oath in the Kentucky Oaks two weeks ago was his first in any Grade 1 stakes race in nearly five years.
But win or lose Saturday with his talented filly, Lukas is already looking ahead. He will be up at 3:30 a.m. on Sunday, and if all goes as planned, he will be back in his favorite spot at Pimlico with a new contender 52 weeks from now.
“Absolutely,” he told the reporters gathered around him. “I’ve got some pretty good 2-year-olds coming up.”
Source: WP
