Across the breadth of the last 15 years, as Hall of Fame thoroughbred horse trainer D. Wayne Lukas aged into his ninth decade of life and yet remarkably continued to contest and occasionally win some of the sport’s biggest races, the racing industry and its media sanded the rough edges off Lukas’s giant, complex personality and created a grandfatherly figure called, “The Coach,” referencing a time when as a younger man he coached high school basketball in his native Wisconsin, but also, more vaguely, his presence as an elder statesman, mentor and geriatric papa to the sport, to its fans, to his grandchildren and their children, too. It was sweet, and there was nothing wrong with the nickname as far as it went. But where it went was straight to the last chapter.

The most enduring and essential sports legacies can also be the most complicated. The very best are not just driven, but obsessive. Not just creative, but ingenious. Not just hungry, but voracious. Jordan. Woods. Ali. Armstrong. Rose. One of Lukas’s favorites, and a close friend: Bob Knight. To name a few. Their stories contain multitudes, but not all of them are easily embraced and some are downright unpleasant. Because transcendence demands a selfish eccentricity; because greatness and normalcy are often mutually exclusive. Lukas has lived long enough to earn a warm embrace that he would not have received as a younger man, but that embrace alone doesn’t tell enough of his outsized story and his place in racing history, where he stands very much alone.

On Sunday Lukas’s family made public the news that Lukas, 89, was entering home hospice care amidst a severe infection and would be retiring immediately from training racehorses. His retirement ends one of the most influential training careers in the long history of the sport; it has become common in the back end of Lukas’s career to say that he “changed” racing with his aggressive approach to scale, cost and lifestyle in the 1980s, but that implies that others have followed. They have not. Not in the same way. There has been just one D. Wayne Lukas — not only the winner of four Kentucky Derbies, seven Preaknesses, four Belmonts, and 20 Breeders’ Cup races, but the audacious architect of the first, sprawling coast-to-coast racing operation, at one time replete with two jets and a helicopter that made him a celebrity approaching the magnitude of the Hollywood stars he socialized with. Lukas was sui generis.

That status came at a cost, as it often does. Lukas has been married five times. When his son, only child, and right-hand assistant, Jeff, suffered a traumatic brain injury when run over by a horse in 1993, a seminal moment in Lukas’s life, Lukas couldn’t devote the time — or more poignantly summon the emotional bandwidth — to care for Jeff, a role that was assumed by family friend and former Lukas Racing business manager David Burrage. In 2013, when I wrote a story for Sports Illustrated about Jeff’s struggles, I sat with Lukas in his office at Saratoga Race Course and he said two things that were stunning in their honesty. First: “I don’t know that you could say we had a normal father-son relationship, because we were both so intense in what we were trying to do. But we had a real good understanding that we cared about each other.” Second, more painfully, with regard to Burrage taking care of Jeff, “My god, David has taken a role here that I wasn’t able to fulfill. I can’t say enough good things about him.”

Burrage summarized it all for me for a 2022 NBC Sports story, as Lukas was preparing to bring the filly Secret Oath to the Preakness. “We all know a lot of people who love what they do,” said Burrage. “But Wayne is different from most of them. He loves what he does, but he only loves that one thing. And he does it all the time, and he doesn’t do anything else. There are negatives to that. It’s tough on married life. Tough on family life.” Obsession and sacrifice are kin.

To understand Lukas’s place in racing history, it’s important to focus on the latter half of the 1980s, when he single-handedly changed the paradigm of the game. He had grown up on a farm in Antigo, Wisconsin, where he tended calves, rode a white pony, and was a willing but mediocre athlete. After college at the University of Wisconsin, he spent six years coaching high school basketball, but in 1967 dove into training quarter horses and became one of the best in history, by dint of equine instinct and tireless effort. In 1978, he took that same passion to thoroughbreds and overwhelmed the game almost from the start.

Nearly everything he did was revolutionary: He didn’t build out one string, he built a handful, in beautifully manicured barns in California, Florida, New York, Kentucky and Louisiana, sometimes others as well. Bankrolled first and lavishly by San Diego Chargers’ owner Eugene V. Klein, Lukas Racing bought two private jets and for a time, a helicopter. (The Lukas Stable grew as large as 400 horses, including those getting broken on farms; Wayne scolded me several times over the years when I wrote that number, claiming the operation was smaller. Others in his employ assured me it was accurate).

He wore $3,000 suits, Rolex watches and distinctive aviator sunglasses to the races. It’s a cliche to call a non-rock star a “rock star,” but in the racing world Lukas was just that. There was enmity. “People are envious,” trainer John Gosden told SI’s William Nack in 1985. “He was at the top of one game, then he came to the thoroughbreds, and in five years he was at the top of that game. There was a lot of jealousy.”

Lukas won his first Triple Crown race with Codex in the 1980 Preakness, and his first Derby with Winning Colors in 1988 (she was trained principally by Jeff, which Wayne always acknowledged). He was also available, and glib. Asked once about what he looked for in a filly, he said, “She should have a head like a princess, a butt like a washerwoman and walk like a hooker.” He took those instincts to the sales and spent prodigiously and with success. Lukas won more stakes races than any trainer every year from 1985-’92.

Trainer D. Wayne Lukas watches his horses train in the morning at Churchill Downs. Photo by Pat McDonogh. April 22, 2025 Pat McDonogh / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Things changed. Klein died in 1990 and money got tighter; Lukas fell behind on bills in the early 1990s, the ebb and flow of client support. In 1993, he caught heavy criticism when Union City, his three-year-old colt, broke down in the Preakness and was euthanized. Racehorses had long broken down, but this came less than two years after Go For Wand went down in the Breeders’ Cup, and with the public becoming less accepting of breakdowns, amid whispers that Lukas pushed his horses hard. “He dances close to the fire,” a trainer anonymously told Nack in 1993. There is some perspective needed: Lukas spent money and he trained aggressively, but others did as well. Lukas was flamboyant and outspoken and the biggest target in the sport.

Seven months after Union City went down, a promising two-year-old named Tabasco Cat ran over Jeff Lukas at Santa Anita; Jeff would live another 23 years, diminished by his injury.

In the more than three decades since Jeff’s injury, Wayne evolved into a racetrack survivor of sorts. Twelve of his 15 Triple Crown wins came from 1994 on, including six in a row with four different horses between 1994 and 1996. He remained feisty, always happy to criticize or belittle a reporter for reasons valid or not. I picked Holy Bull to defeat Tabasco in the 1994 Travers at Saratoga and Lukas found me in the paddock to tell me I was wrong and ill-informed; Holy Bull won the race, but I was guessing. The larger point: He never stopped winning. Never stopped training. Never stopped fighting.

He turned 65 in the new century and his body began to fail him: Hips, knees, spine. He kept getting on his horse in the morning, eventually with the help of a small stepstool, because his body felt best up there in a saddle. He walked with a cane, and complained about it, but his wife Laurie told me, “He likes the cane.” He got tight with Jeff’s kids: Air Force veteran Brady, now 34, and physician’s assistant Kelly, now 31, and living near Wayne and Laurie’s home in Louisville, recompense of a sort but Wayne would never have called it that.He took pride in the long list of assistants who learned from him, but resisted emeritus status.

In 2013, he won the Preakness with Oxbow, and that was supposed to be the last one. Then in 2022 he won that Kentucky Oaks, a race for fillies, with Secret Oath and brought her to Pimlico to finish fourth after a rough trip. That was supposed to be the last one, too, until in 2024, Lukas’s Seize the Grey won the Preakness for his 88-year-old trainer. Trainers lined up to congratulate him, and Bob Baffert, who had supplanted Lukas at the top of the sport, said “Wayne… is … the.. man. I’m so happy for him. There’s never been a better horseman. He works so hard, and he’s a legend, and he just won’t give up.”

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – MAY 18: Seize the Grey co-owner Michael Behrens and trainer D. Wayne Lukas celebrate in the winners circle after their horse won the 149th running of the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico Race Course on May 18, 2024 in Baltimore, Maryland. (Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images) Getty Images

This spring Lukas saddled American Promise in both the Kentucky Derby (finished 16th) and Preakness (finished 8th).

Visitors to either event could have seen Lukas in the morning, sitting astride his pony, wearing leather chaps and a white Stetson, 89 years young. It was absurd, but it was also right where he belonged, and how he will be remembered. A man in his element.

Tim Layden is writer-at-large for NBC Sports. He was previously a senior writer at Sports Illustrated for 25 years.