Monday Morning Message with Jason Beem for June 23, 2025

Jason discusses the retirement announcement by legendary trainer D. Wayne Lukas. 

A good Monday morning to you all! Hope everyone had a great weekend. I had a wonderful little staycation an hour away in Sarasota and got to enjoy some great weather and beach time at the Gulf. It’s my last week here in Florida before heading up to Virginia for the Colonial Downs season, and we’ll obviously talk a lot of Colonial as that meet gets closer. 

Wanted to write about the news that came out Sunday that trainer D. Wayne Lukas has retired from training at the age of 89. I certainly want to wish him and his family all the best as the statement released said that he will be spending time at home with his family while he battles an infection. 

Lukas began training in the 1970s and has been saddling winners for six decades – 4,953 of them as of writing this column. And that’s just Thoroughbreds. He also was an accomplished Quarter Horse trainer. It’s a career filled with an insane amount of achievements, wins, and memories that have placed him in a legendary stratosphere as far as horse trainers are concerned. His Wikipedia page and Equibase page show a “who’s who” of horses from over the last many decades. 

One of Lukas’ legacies will be how successful and how large and spread out his stable became. It’s not that unusual now to see a top trainer based at a few tracks. “D. Wayne off the plane” is still one of my favorite little horse racing sayings. As a kid in the 1980s and early ‘90s, before the internet and the expansion of simulcasting, I mostly just followed our local racing circuit in Washington State. But I found out pretty early who D. Wayne Lukas was. He was as close to a rock star as horse racing has ever had. 

His trainer tree is also likely never to be repeated again. Todd Pletcher, Kiaran McLaughlin, Dallas Stewart, Mark Hennig, Mike Maker, and so many more. His son Jeff was his longtime assistant, and according to many friends I’ve talked with over the years, would have been a superstar trainer himself if not for the terrible accident in 1993. 

I think for a lot of athletes and people in racing, folks determine a career based on stats and accomplishments, but I also imagine much of the “success” is measured in things that aren’t measurable. Lukas’ habit of bringing new people to the winner’s circle when his horses won and letting them have a special moment with a legend was always a really cool thing to see. 

We had NBC News’ Steve Kornacki on the podcast earlier this year, and he talked about just how cool it was to get to interview Wayne and listen to him hold court. I had the good fortune to hear Wayne speak at the Alibi Breakfast at Pimlico last year, and he had the whole room in the palm of his hand as he spun his tales on stage. He of course would go on to win the Preakness (G1) later that week. I was sitting one section to his right when he won that race, and I remember shaking my head as he walked down to the winner’s circle. He’d done it again. 

Have a good week everyone.