Pletcher, Stewart share memories of Winning Colors

LOUISVILLE, Ky – Trainer Todd Pletcher was in his junior year at the University of Arizona when Winning Colors captured the Kentucky Derby 30 years ago. A little more than a year later, Pletcher began working full time for Winning Colors’s trainer, D. Wayne Lukas. Between the two of them, they have won the Derby six times, and they will have five of the 20 runners in this year’s Derby on Saturday.

“I remember watching the race in Tucson, the significance of a filly winning, Wayne’s first Derby, Forty Niner coming at her at the end, and the controversy over whether he made his run too late,” Pletcher recalled this week at Churchill Downs, where he will send out four runners of his own in this year’s Derby.

“The summer before that, I had worked in Chicago for Randy Bradshaw, who was Wayne’s assistant there. And then that summer,” Pletcher said, referring to 1988, “I worked for Charlie Whittingham at Hollywood Park.”

It wasn’t until April of 1989, just before he graduated, that Pletcher met with Lukas to finalize going to work for him full time. A month later, “I drove cross-country with my dad to New York, and we got there just in time to watch the Sunday Silence-Easy Goer Preakness,” Pletcher said. “The next day, I started working for Wayne.”

Pletcher would work for Lukas – a four-time Derby winner – until the fall of 1995. He went out on his own after that year’s Breeders’ Cup at Belmont Park.

The day the color drained out of Stewart

Dallas Stewart was working for Lukas in the spring of 1988, based at Santa Anita with Lukas’s son and top assistant, Jeff. Their barn had many of the best runners in the country, including Winning Colors.

Stewart was Winning Colors’s exercise rider at Churchill Downs, but he did not get on her regularly at Santa Anita. He was often in her company, though. One afternoon at Santa Anita, Stewart recalled this week, he was grazing Winning Colors when his lead shank snapped.

“She got loose, and walked towards another filly we had, Lost Kitty, who kicked her above the knee,” Stewart said. “Jeff got an ice boot on her right away, and fortunately nothing bad happened. If that kick had hit her knee, she was history.

“Jeff picked up the phone to call Wayne and handed it to me and said, ‘You tell my dad.’”