A normal August finds Wayne Lukas in upstate New York, at Saratoga Race Course, getting a 2-year-old ready for an upcoming stakes race -- say, the Hopeful -- as a springboard to further juvenile glory or in its 3-year-old campaign.
After all, who knows the road to the Triple Crown or any major race better than the Hall of Famer? The former basketball coach and quarter-horse trainer has 20 Breeders' Cup and 14 Triple Crown victories, both records. Twenty-five of his horses have won an Eclipse Award, the Academy Award of the profession, including three crowned Horse of the Year: Lady's Secret in 1986, Criminal Type in 1990 and Charismatic in 1999. He has been named champion trainer four times and led in purse money 14 times.
Once a flamboyant trainer wearing silk suits and peering out over his domain behind sunglasses, running horses at many tracks and ever ready to defy conventional wisdom, Lukas has reinvented himself several times. The latest incarnation is that of a paternal figure who still gets to the track first every morning and surveys his kingdom from horseback.
"Wayne," said the late John Asher, a former Churchill Downs executive who considered Lukas a close friend, "will give a horse every chance."
Affectionately called "Coach" on any backstretch (including Oaklawn Park) he might be, Lukas has many people in and out of the industry praying for his speedy recovery from the COVID-19 virus.
Lukas, who turns 85 on Sept. 2, is currently at his home in Louisville, according to a social media post by grandson Brady Wayne Lukas. He had missed several days training at Ellis Park (Henderson, Ky.) and had subsequently become symptomatic, although no one else was affected, said the younger Lukas.
On Wednesday, Brady Lukas posted on Twitter: "Wayne is on the road to recovery and looks forward to getting back on the track."
Horses trained by Lukas have earned more than $284.5 million on the racetrack and tens of millions more in the breeding shed. His four Kentucky Derby winners include filly Winning Colors (1988) and came for four different owners. He once won three consecutive Belmont Stakes (1984-86), challenging the race record of five straight victories by the late Woody Stephens.
One of Lukas' most inspiring efforts is his work with Tabasco Cat, the horse that as a 2-year-old trampled son Jeff on the backstretch at Santa Anita Park in California. Rather than give up on the horse, Lukas groomed Tabasco Cat into the 1994 Preakness and Belmont Stakes winner, launching a streak of six consecutive wins by the trainer in the Triple Crown series. In 1995, Lukas won all three races, the Derby and Belmont with Thunder Gulch and the Preakness with juvenile champion Timber Country.
Lukas has turned out such noted trainers as Todd Pletcher, Mike Maker, Dallas Stewart, Randy Bradshaw and Kiaran McLaughlin. He is a former Oaklawn training champion (1981) with back-to-back wins in the Arkansas Derby. He won the 1984 Derby with the filly Althea, wheeling back the daughter of Alydar seven days after a troubled effort in the Fantasy Stakes. He repeated in 1985 with Tank's Prospect, ridden by a then-aspiring Gary Stevens after the colt underwent surgery for an entrapped epiglottis.
Hall of Famer Pat Day rode Tank's Prospect to victory in the 1985 Preakness, a race Lukas won six times. Thirteen years since his last Triple Crown victory, Lukas won the 2013 Preakness with the Oaklawn-raced Oxbow for Calumet Farm with Stevens, out of retirement at age 50, aboard
In recent years, Lukas trained two champions for Arkansas horseman Willis Horton. The late-blooming 3-year-old Will Take Charge claimed a 2013 divisional honor after winning the Travers Stakes and just missing in the Breeders' Cup Classic. Take Charge Brandi, an Oaklawn stakes winner at 3 as was Will Take Charge, won the 2014 Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies and was named divisional champion.