Wayne Lukas: The Greatest of All Time

[Wandering Eyes]

Those who have been following racing for, oh, 10 years or less, they may not quite understand the impact Wayne Lukas had on horse racing or how much he changed what it meant to be a successful horse trainer. The Wayne Lukas who was still training when his 90th birthday was just around the corner transformed into your favorite uncle or grandfather. He became the sport's elder statesman.

There was a sweet and gentle side to the man that everyone started calling “Coach” because he was once a high school basketball coach. Once a little prickly with the press, he became the go-to guy any time you needed a witty quote or wanted a history lesson from someone who had seen and done it all. Whenever he won a race, he'd pick a little kid out of the crowd to join him and his owners in the winner's circle ceremony. He prospered in this role and generally seemed delighted that he could continue to be a positive force for the sport even though major wins were not coming his way like they used to.

This was a very different chapter in his life, but it doesn't tell the real story of D. Wayne Lukas, the greatest trainer of all time.     He burst onto the scene in 1980 when his Codex defeated heroine Genuine Risk in the 1980 GI Preakness. Codex carried Genuine Risk wide on the far turn and the filly's fans were irate that they didn't disqualify the horse trained by the Quarter Horse guy. Lukas, along with Angel Cordero Jr., were the bullies who mugged Genuine Risk.

The week after the nationally televised Preakness, a bag of letters and telegrams was delivered to Lukas' barn office at Hollywood Park.

“They were mostly telegrams,” Lukas told the Los Angeles Times in 1988. “From little girls and women. They were running about 50 to 1 against us, because we beat the filly in a controversial race. I quit reading them, because you could tell what most of them were going to say.”

D. Wayne Lukas next to Will Take Charge | Steve Sherack

Lukas was just getting started. He had only begun training Thoroughbreds in 1977.

Racing has never been an innovative sport and since he came out of the Quarter Horse game, he didn't know or didn't care to know the unwritten rules of being a Thoroughbred trainer. He was not going to be satisfied to win a few training titles and maybe some graded stakes wins here or there. He wanted to dominate.

Some found him to be arrogant and many were jealous, something that Lukas never seemed to care about.

In 1986, the year when he won his first Eclipse Award, he won 259 races, including 62 stakes races. But you can't win 62 stakes by staying in just one place. Lukas won a lot of races at his home circuit, the Southern California tracks, but he also won stakes at 12 tracks outside of California. Even so, he might not have won the Eclipse Award if he adhered to conventional wisdom and wouldn't run a filly vs. the boys. That's exactly what he did with Lady's Secret, whose wins that year included one over males in the GI Whitney H. That, more than any other race, was what made her the Horse of the Year.

“We turned the attitude of just seeing what was in front of you, the ones you had on hand, and just running at that particular track,” he told the Daily Racing Form in 2012. “We tried to make every horse useful. Not every one could play in the NFL, or the major leagues. We went after every stakes wherever it was. Omaha, New Jersey–if we thought a horse fit, he was on a plane. They used to call it 'Wayne off the plane.' They would run very well off the plane. We'd go all over the place.”

Today, there are a dozen or so trainers, including Lukas's former assistant Todd Pletcher, who follow the same philosophy. In 1986, there was only one “super trainer” and it was Lukas. He created the blueprint for others to follow and, for better or worse, it's now a different game. A handful of trainers have divisions at several tracks and they win a lot of big races. It was Lukas who showed them how.

Several of his best owners passed away and some saw Lukas as being out of touch, for no other reason than he was getting old. It was becoming harder and harder for him to get his hands on the type of talented horses he used to have by the dozen. He had some lean years. He won 118 races in 2000 and has not cracked the 100-win barrier since. He would never again be the Wayne Lukas who won three straight Eclipse Awards from 1985 to 1987. From 2012 to 2025, he averaged 23 wins a year.

But you could never count him out. Between 2019 and 2021, he failed to win a single stakes race. Just when it looked like he was all but finished, he won the 2022 GI Kentucky Oaks with Secret Oath (Arrogate) and the 2024 GI Preakness and GI Pennsylvania Derby with Seize the Grey (Arrogate). He's 16-for-117 in 2025 with three stakes wins, none of them graded.

For someone who had had so much success in the past, he could have become bitter. He did not forget how to train a good horse, they just weren't sending him many good horses. But he was still able to get up every morning at a ridiculous hour, get on his own pony, and go to the track every day to see them train. This routine was no doubt helping to keep him alive. He knew what his place in racing was and that the days of training horses like Lady's Secret and Codex were long gone, but he genuinely seemed to enjoy this new chapter to his career. It kept him young and gave him a purpose. He was never going to settle comfortably into a typical retirement that included fishing and golf.

His horses have already been moved to his assistant Sebastian “Bas” Nicholl.

“Wayne built a legacy that will never be matched,” Nicholl said. “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 that he's built.”

Well said. We wish Nicholl all the luck in the world, but he's right about one thing, he will never be the next Wayne Lukas. No one will.

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