SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY — This is not a new story. The calendar flips to September, the Saratoga season is in its final few days and Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas is having another birthday.
Lukas turns 88 Saturday and the beat goes on. He will get up at 3 a.m. and within an hour will arrive at his barn located a couple of hundred yards from the Oklahoma training track. As usual, he will be in the saddle on his pony accompanying his horses as they go out for their morning exercise. In the afternoon, with a big cowboy hat on his head, he will be in the paddock at Saratoga Race Course to saddle a couple more starters.
Forget about a party. Lukas said he has to make sure that his wife Laurie is in line with his desire to treat Sept. 2 as pretty much just another day. He doesn't want any surprises.
“What we do here is we get a big old cake and we put it out there on the picnic table, let everybody get one of those plates over there and just have at it,” he said. “That's it.”
It is impossible to know who has been the oldest trainer to send a horse to the track since Thoroughbred racing commenced at Saratoga in 1863. At this point, Lukas is definitely not the oldest. The legendary James “Sunny Jim” Fitzsimmons reached his 88th birthday before the 1962 Saratoga season. In one of those can-you-believe-this Saratoga stats, Fitzsimmons was the leading trainer at Saratoga that summer, his finale upstate before retiring the following June. He locked up the title, which only took nine victories during the 24-day season, with three wins on the next-to-last day of the meet, Aug. 24. As the trainer for the Phipps family, Fitzsimmons had top-quality stock in his barn. Four of his nine wins were in stakes: the Schuylerville, Adirondack, Bernard Baruch and Seneca.
Fitzsimmons, who died at the age of 91 in 1966, switched from an undistinguished career as a jockey to training horses and continued on with distinction in parts of eight decades. He was the leading trainer at Saratoga four times and the national earnings leader five times. His record of 13 of Triple Crown race victories, stood for 56 years until Lukas picked up his 14th in 2013.
Lukas was a school teacher and coach before going full-time into training Quarter Horses in 1969. Equibase stats show him starting his career training Thoroughbreds in 1974. He has 4,910 victories and over $292 million in purse earnings. Once he got rolling with his nationwide Thoroughbred stable, he became the gold standard and among his many other successes, led the nation in earnings 14 times in a span of 15 years.
Decades ago, Lukas made it clear that he had no intention to retire and has continued on. While he is in Saratoga, he likes to play the machines at the nearby Saratoga Casino.
“If I get an afternoon off, I'm so bored,” he said. “That's why I end up in the casino. I've got to have another challenge so I go in there and try to beat them where the odds are really bad. I don't even handle an afternoon off very good let alone if I woke up at nine o'clock and had breakfast and wondered what the rest of the day was going to be.”
Lukas said continuing to do what he has been doing all these years–getting up in the middle of the night, climbing into the saddle and operating his stable–are elements of the elixir that has kept him going. He's not about to stop.
“I think those people that back off, every one of my friends colleagues and so forth that I saw retire and back off, at say, 70, every one of them went downhill,” he said.
In the last 30 years, five of his top owners have died, which has forced him to restructure his business. He said he is proud that at his age he is still able to compete at the top at tracks in Kentucky, New York and Arkansas.
“But here's the thing: I've eliminated the big stable,” he said. “I've limited it to 40 head. That allows me to be hands-on and personal with every horse, much different than when I had the assistants like Todd [Pletcher] and Mark Hennig and all these kids underneath me. So, I limit it to 40. It gives me great satisfaction. I see every horse.”
After a long run at Saratoga, Lukas skipped the 2020 and 2021 seasons due to a combination of the Covid-19 pandemic and a drop in quality of his stable. He returned last summer, compiled a solid 7-6-2 record from 31 starters and had purse earnings of $774,927. His GI Kentucky Oaks winner Secret Oath (Arrogate) was the star of the stable, but ended up second to Nest (Curlin) in the GI Coaching Club American Oaks and the GI Alabama S. Secret Oath is still with Lukas, was second in the GI Personal Ensign S., and he is confident she will run well in the GI Juddmonte Spinster S. at Keeneland.
Not only did he have success on the track in 2022, but with new owners, John Bellinger and Brian Coelho, who operate as BC Stables, he was active at the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga Sale.
“We went through a lull there,” Lukas said. “Even though we kept the barn full, we didn't have the quality. Now we have picked up Bellinger and Coelho and we should finish up here in the next couple of years–finish up, I mean until I die–we should finish up pretty good.”
The stable hasn't been quite as strong this summer at Saratoga. Entering Friday it has three wins and 10 seconds from 32 starts and Lukas is hoping for a couple more victories. He will send out a pair of runners on his birthday. On Sunday, he will try to win the GI Spinaway S. for the seventh time with BC's maiden Lady Moscato (Quality Road). Just Steel (Justify) will carry the BC colors in the GI Hopeful S. on closing day Monday. He will be Lukas's 34th starter in the Hopeful, a race he has won a record eight times.
Always looking ahead, Lukas said he expects to have a better-balanced barn in 2024. This year he is heavy with 2-year-olds–14 of the 39 horses he is training–and some of them might put him back on the road to the Triple Crown.
“That's building for the future,” he said. “We've already bought some really good yearlings. If we come back next year and bring 20 to 25 head, there will be some good 3-year-olds in there and some good 2-year-olds in there. We'll be building more to where we used to be.”
If he has his way, Lukas will win a race at Saratoga after his 89th birthday and step past Fitzsimmons again.
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