D. Wayne Lukas, a horseman who revolutionized the sport of Thoroughbred racing while becoming one of the most accomplished trainers and iconic figures in the industry, died at his home Saturday evening after battling a blood infection. He was 89. "Wayne devoted his life not only to horses but to the industry -- developing generations of horsemen and horsewomen and growing the game by inviting unsuspecting fans into the winner’s circle," the Lukas family said in a statement announcing Wayne's passing. "Whether he was boasting about a maiden 2-year-old as the next Kentucky Derby winner or offering quiet words of advice before a big race, Wayne brought heart,  grace, and grit to every corner of the sport. "His final days were spent at home in Kentucky, where he chose peace, family, and faith. As we grieve at his passing, we find peace in knowing he is now reunited with his beloved son, Jeff, whose memory he carried in his heart always." It was announced on June 22 that Lukas had been hospitalized due to the infection and the effects it had on his body and that he was stepping away from training, turning his stable over to longtime assistant Sebastian “Bas” Nicholl. Lukas had decided to forgo an aggressive treatment plan laid out by doctors, opting instead to spend his final days at home surrounded by family and friends. A Hall of Fame trainer in both the Quarter Horse and Thoroughbred world, Lukas made his mark in the biggest events, winning 15 Triple Crown races and 20 Breeders’ Cup races, the latter still a record he shares with Ireland’s Aidan O’Brien. Lukas was the first trainer to open up large divisions at multiple racetracks during the height of racing season, trained horses who won 26 Eclipse Awards -- including three who were named Horse of the Year -- and was the trunk of a tree that produced a bevy of top Thoroughbred trainers. “He will be missed, but he changed this industry so much,” Kiaran McLaughlin, one of those former assistants who went on to a successful training career, said. Lukas, who was given the name Darrell, was raised on 10-acre farm in a small community outside of his birthplace, Antigo, Wisconsin. In his youth, he raced his pony at the Antigo County Fairgrounds. Lukas became friends with Clyde Rice -- a successful trainer and father of trainer Linda Rice -- who helped Lukas purchase mustangs headed to the slaughterhouse. Lukas broke and retrained them and sold them at auction. Lukas received his degree in education from the University of Wisconsin and while he taught high school for a short period of time, he ultimately became a tenured professor of horse training in both the Quarter Horse and Thoroughbred arenas. Beginning in 1968, Lukas trained Quarter Horses for a decade, his best individual being Dash for Cash, the 1976-77 world champion and one of 24 Quarter Horse champions he trained. Lukas, inducted into the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame in 2007, made the full-time transition to Thoroughbreds in 1978, though his first official winner in the sport came in October 1977. Early on in his Thoroughbred career, Lukas became a fixture at Thoroughbred sales. His work in the sales ring became the subject of a book “Lukas at Auction,” by Joe Bagan. Lukas had a rating system he used that put more emphasis on conformation than pedigree. One of his early successes was Terlingua, a filly Lukas bought for $275,000 as a yearling for owner Barry Beal -- who later brought in L.R. French as a partner. Terlingua won multiple stakes but became best known as the dam of Storm Cat, who would go on to become a legendary stallion. Lukas, according to the Bagan book, spent $103 million in the sales ring from 1979-88. In 1980, Lukas won his first Triple Crown race when Codex won the Preakness, defeating the Kentucky Derby-winning filly Genuine Risk. That victory would become somewhat emblematic of his career, one full of classic victories but tinged with controversy. Some felt that in the Preakness, Codex was ridden too aggressively by Angel Cordero Jr. and intimidated Genuine Risk. Lukas, when recalling Codex’s Preakness win decades later, told how the next day he received a bag full of telegrams from fans, the majority of which were negative. “They were running about eight of 10 bad,” Lukas said last month when he was at the Preakness with American Promise. “Most of them said, ‘You mugged the filly, you did this, you did that.’ It wasn’t very positive. I thought, ‘I’m going to quit reading these damn things.’ “ Codex’s victory was the springboard to immense success for Lukas in the 1980s, a period during which Lukas accumulated deep-pocketed owners and amassed enough horses to open up divisions in most of the major racing jurisdictions  -- New York, California, Kentucky, and New Jersey. Lukas kept his barns immaculate with flowers and fencing and he and his help wore expensive suits to the races. Among Lukas’s first major patrons was Eugene Klein, owner of the San Diego Chargers of the NFL, who bankrolled Lukas at the sales ring. With Lukas, Klein campaigned champions Lady’s Secret, Life’s Magic, Open Mind, and Winning Colors, all but Life’s Magic having been enshrined in Thoroughbred racing’s Hall of Fame. In 1988, Winning Colors became the third filly to win the Kentucky Derby, giving Lukas the first of what would be four victories in the world’s most famous horse race. Lukas also won the Derby with Thunder Gulch (1995), Grindstone (1996), and Charismatic (1999). The victories by Thunder Gulch and Grindstone came during a stretch when Lukas won six consecutive Triple Crown races and seven of eight. The first two of those victories -- the 1994 Preakness and Belmont Stakes -- came with Tabasco Cat. Ironically, in December of 1993, Tabasco Cat, who had gotten away from his handlers, ran into Jeff Lukas, Wayne’s son and assistant, causing him serious brain injuries, after which Jeff Lukas was never the same. Jeff Lukas died in 2016. In 1995, Wayne Lukas won the Kentucky Derby with Thunder Gulch, the Preakness with Timber Country, and the Belmont Stakes with Thunder Gulch. Lukas won the 1996 Derby with Grindstone, but that horse did not make it to the Preakness. Lukas ran three in that year’s Preakness, finishing third with Editor’s Note, who would come back three weeks later to win the Belmont. Overall, Lukas’s 15 Triple Crown victories -- seven Preaknesses and four Belmonts to go along with his four Derbies – are second only to Bob Baffert’s 17. In 2024, at age 88, Lukas became the oldest trainer to win a Triple Crown race when Seize the Grey won the Preakness for MyRacehorse, a horse racing partnership that sold microshares to individuals for nominal fees. Seize the Grey had 2,570 partners. “Isn’t that something to make that many people happy?” Lukas said in the post-race press conference. While Baffert may have surpassed Lukas in Triple Crown victories, he referred to Lukas as "a tremendous horseman, probably the greatest who ever lived" in a post on X. "As I grew older and wiser, Wayne remained the competition, but he also became a mentor and one of my best friends," Baffert wrote. "When he beat me, I knew I was beaten by the best. When I beat him, I knew I had done something right." Lukas’s Triple Crown record did not come without travails and controversy. At the 1993 Preakness, Union City suffered a fatal injury during the running of the race, which came two weeks after he finished 15th in the Kentucky Derby. In 1997, Lukas ran the longshot Deeds Not Words in the Kentucky Derby, though his resume was not that of a Derby horse. Deeds Not Words finished last in a 13-horse field. Some in the media mentioned Lukas ran the horse in the race mostly to keep his streak of Derby appearances alive -- that was his 17th straight of what would become 20 consecutive years in which Lukas ran a horse in the Derby. Lukas grew angry with the media, labeling reporters “cockroaches,” for failing to report that the owners were the ones who put up the money to run in the Derby. Lukas was inducted in the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 1999, the same year that he won his last Kentucky Derby with Charismatic, a horse who twice ran for a claiming price. Charismatic won the Preakness but his bid for the Triple Crown fell short when he finished third in the Belmont Stakes, suffering a career-ending injury in the race. In addition to Klein, Lukas trained for owner/breeder William T. Young’s Overbrook Farm, which owned Grindstone, and Bob and Beverly Lewis, for whom he trained Charismatic, the 1999 Horse of Year, as well as the sensational filly Serena’s Song, who won 18 of 38 starts, including 11 Grade 1s, and was an Eclipse champion. Lukas was the dominant trainer in the early years of the Breeders’ Cup. From 1985-1994, Lukas won 12 Breeders’ Cup races during a time when the event consisted of seven races on one day. He won three on the 1988 card at Churchill Downs, and almost had a fourth, but Winning Colors was run down at the wire by Personal Ensign in the Distaff. Lukas amassed 4,953 career wins, which puts him eighth all-time and his horses earned $300,534,634 million, sixth all-time. Lukas had such a decorated a career as a Thoroughbred trainer that there is a wing dedicated to him at the Kentucky Derby Museum on the grounds of Churchill Downs. The comprehensive exhibit is filled with many of the trophies and other memorabilia Lukas entrusted to the museum beginning in 2017. For all his accomplishments with his horses, Lukas’s legacy may be his training tree. Horsemen like Todd Pletcher, Kiaran McLaughlin, Mark Hennig, Bobby Barnett, Randy Bradshaw, Mike Maker, Dallas Stewart, and George Weaver all worked for Lukas before embarking on successful careers of their own. Pletcher, a winner of two Kentucky Derbies, four Belmont Stakes, and eight Eclipse Awards as North America’s champion trainer, worked for Lukas from mid-May 1989 to December 1995 before going out on his own. In the last 30 years, Pletcher has become Thoroughbred racing’s all-time leading money earner in purse money won with more than $500 million and was elected into the Hall of Fame in 2021. “I think for all of us who had the fortune to work there, everything we’ve been able to accomplish is a by-product of what we learned from Wayne and the way he ran his organization,” Pletcher said. “If you were able to work your way up to an assistant’s position, it was the ultimate endorsement for someone who wanted to train on their own.” Pletcher believes Lukas could have been successful at whatever profession he chose.  “I could actually have seen him as a very, very successful basketball coach or politician,” Pletcher said. “Whatever he chose or set his mind to, he was going to succeed at; definitely one of the most dedicated people I’ve been around, definitely one of the most resilient and optimistic for sure.” Due to traveling restrictions as a result of COVID-19 protocols in 2020, Pletcher shipped Money Moves to Lukas for him to saddle for the Kentucky Derby. Pletcher wasn’t high on the colt’s chances but said Lukas would call him in the days leading up to the race and tell him how well the horse was training. “I remember thinking, maybe he’s doing that well and has a shot,” Pletcher said. Money Moves finished 13th. McLaughlin, who worked for Lukas from 1985-92,  said Lukas “taught me a lot about the world -- everything -- just the quality of life, he led such a quality of life and always was looking out for us and his help,” said McLaughlin, who is a now a jockey agent for Luis Saez and John Velazquez. “I learned so much from him and he coached me all the way until this year.” McLaughlin spoke about the attention to detail Lukas paid not only to his horses, but to his help. “One morning, getting ready here in New York for a stake and he said, ‘Let me show you how to tie that tie.’ ” McLaughlin said. McLaughlin said when the stable ran horses at Aqueduct or Belmont in the afternoon and then had runners in at The Meadowlands at night, Lukas wanted him to travel by limousine between tracks. “You can’t be up at 4 in the morning and be home at 1 in the morning so we did have a limo take us,” McLaughlin said. “He was a worker and he’d get up early and I remember picking him up at his house at 2:30 in the morning when we were shipping Tank’s Prospect for the Kentucky Derby. He didn’t ask you to do something he wasn’t willing to do.” Hennig worked for Lukas from 1987-92. He remembers Jeff Lukas picking him at the airport and going straight to the Belmont Park barn at 9:30 p.m. and marveling at the horseflesh stabled there -- a 2-year-old Winning Colors, Capote, Lady’s Secret, and Sacahuista -- all who would be crowned champions. On his own, Hennig has won more than 1,500 races and trained a bevy of graded stakes winners including Summer Colony, Raging Fever, Gold Mover, and Star of Cozzene. “I don’t feel like I’d be where I am or have near the success that I did if it wasn’t for him taking a bunch of us on and putting us in a great situation to succeed,” Hennig said. “We worked hard and he demanded a lot from us, but it was him that put us in that position and gave us that opportunity and I’ll forever be grateful.” Trainer Mark Casse, elected to the Hall of Fame in 2020, called Lukas “the most influential person [in racing] in the last 50 years.” Casse said he had the “utmost respect” for Lukas and at the Preakness he was humbled when Lukas complimented him at the annual Alibi Breakfast. “He said, ‘You always got to worry about Mark Casse,’ ” Casse said. “That made me feel really good. When a guy of his stature gives you a compliment like that it just means everything. I think we can all wish and hope to live our life the way he did, for as long as he has and come out and be successful to the very end.” Cordero, who became a Hall of Fame jockey, first met Lukas in 1977, when he was out in California to ride. Cordero said he and Lukas roomed together during two winters and said Lukas became like a second father to him. “They used to have a disco on top of the place we used to stay and whenever he went to Los Alamitos to run Quarter Horses I went to the disco,” Cordero said. “He said good athletes don’t go to bed late. . . . He made me understand more about my profession. He said, ‘You’re very talented, you’re not disciplined.’ ” Cordero said he cried for two days when he heard Lukas had become ill and had to give up training. “I love that man,” Cordero said. “I owe half or three-quarters of my success to him. He’ll always be in my mind and my prayers and he’ll always be the best.” Lukas is survived by his wife Laurie, grandchildren Brady Wayne Lukas (Dani) and Kelly Lukas Roy (David); great grandchildren Walker Wayne Lukas, Quinn Palmer Lukas, Jonathan James Roy, and Thomas David Roy; his sister Dauna Lukas Moths and his brother Lowell Lukas. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the Oaklawn or Churchill Backside Chaplaincy or the Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance. A private service will be held with immediate family , with a larger celebration of life to follow. Details will become available at a later date. :: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.