Seize the Grey wins Preakness, giving D. Wayne Lukas his seventh title
Seize the Grey wins Preakness, giving D. Wayne Lukas his seventh title
BALTIMORE — D. Wayne Lukas, 88 years young, leaned on his cane as he ambled into the winner’s circle Saturday evening, wire-frame sunglasses and a gleaming white Stetson protecting his face from the sun, which had just peeked out from behind the clouds over Pimlico Race Course.
It had been half a lifetime ago, in 1980, when Lukas first trained a horse that won the Preakness Stakes. He won the 149th version Saturday with a colt named Seize the Grey, who made an audacious run from wire to wire as a 9-1 long shot and held off a charge that would have set up a run at history.
Ridden by Puerto Rican jockey Jaime Torres, who was making his first Triple Crown start, Seize the Grey refused to let Kentucky Derby winner Mystik Dan pass him on the homestretch. Mystik Dan settled for second, edging Catching Freedom by a nose at the wire.
As Lukas saddled his 47th and 48th starters in the Preakness, he won it for the seventh time, trailing only rival and friend Bob Baffert.
“I think they want to get rid of me,” Lukas said on NBC’s broadcast. “I think they want me to retire. I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Mystik Dan could not become the first Derby champion to win the Preakness since Justify — a Baffert horse — in 2018, even after the midweek scratch of Muth installed him as the favorite, his odds dropping to 2-1 by post time. Following two Triple Crown winners in a four-year stretch, 2024 will mark the sixth year in a row without one.
“Waye’s an amazing guy,” Mystik Dan trainer Kenny McPeek said. “He’s a guy I’ve always idolized.”
There also will not be the first Triple Crown winner since 1978 trained by somebody other than Baffert, who loomed over the Preakness as he reemerged from his Kentucky Derby exile. Baffert served a suspension from Churchill Downs for the third year in a row, a penalty stemming from Medina Spirit’s positive drug test in 2021. Baffert could not repeat his feat from a year ago, when National Treasure handed him his record eighth Preakness victory.
At the Preakness, Baffert saddled just one horse, Imagination, who faded to seventh out of eight horses.
Well into his fifth decade of saddling Triple Crown horses, Lukas spent the week as he always does, either straddling a horse or sitting in a white folding chair at the far end of the Pimlico stakes barn, holding court with old friends and applying the wisdom of an 88-year-old horseman to all he observed.
“Can you imagine how many people are going to relish in this and enjoy it?” Lukas asked in an NBC interview.
Seize the Grey grabbed the lead immediately out of the starting gate and held it for the entirety of the 1 3/16 miles. Mystik Dan charged late, taking a stab at the middle jewel of the Triple Crown, but Seize the Grey had the stamina to outlast him.
The hazy gray sky intermittently dumped and spit rain all afternoon. The main track’s conditions were listed as “muddy,” which was like calling the Willis Tower “tall.”
The sopping conditions and the dilapidation of the facility contributed to a sleepy atmosphere and another year of low attendance. The infield, once notorious for its rowdiness, was downright tame, with swaths of empty green grass replacing a teeming mass of inebriated humanity. Maryland dignitaries from Gov. Wes Moore (D) to Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson attended, but the day lacked buzz.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.