SLAM! Sports
Horse Racing
COLUMNS
AT THE POST
THOROUGHBRED
HARNESS
BREEDERS CUP
INTERACTIVE
ALSO ON SLAM!
Losing wasn't the worst of it
In the span of a few hundred yards on a postcard Saturday afternoon, he lost both the crowning achievement of a career and most likely, the horse that was going to give it to him.
One moment, the trainer's game colt, Charismatic, was leading the Belmont. The next moment, he was a beaten favorite, finishing third. And in the moment after that, as Lukas and owner Bob Lewis consoled one another over coming close enough to a Triple Crown to wrap their arms around it, he looked back up the track to see his horse in distress, struggling just to stay on its feet.
Back at his barn minutes later, Lukas was still shaken, searching for the words to describe the way his emotions had been whipsawed. Behind him and to the right, Charismatic was resting in a stall, with a left leg broken in two spots. The veterinarians had come and gone, the colt's connections wandered around the shedrow in stunned silence, and Lukas and his wife fought back tears.
"I think we had the right horse in the right place on the right day," he said. "We just didn't get the right situation."
Lukas does not deny he had led a charmed life for nearly two months now, ever since the first Saturday in May, when Charismatic rocketed from a claiming horse to the champion of both the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness. And up until the chestnut reached the eighth pole Saturday, leading the field in a final drive for home, it seemed like the right situation was about to become the perfect one.
Except for the Triple Crown, Lukas owns every honor that can be accorded a trainer. He has won $200 million in purses, nearly double what his closest pursuer has. The week before the Derby, he was elected to thoroughbred racing's Hall of Fame. He owns 18 Eclipse awards. He has 13 Breeders Cup victories and wins in 12 Triple Crown races, though not a sweep of all three in the same year with the same horse.
And so that's what this Belmont title, the Triple Crown and the $5 million bonus that's thrown in was going to be -- his exclamation point. And it was, at least until that fateful stride at the eighth pole, when jockey Chris Antley felt Charismatic do something he would later describe as "a bobble."
"It was almost," Antley said, still fighting back tears, "like letting out air. ... I steadied him just a bit and that horse" -- that would be Lemon Drop Kid, the eventual winner -- "came on."
As Antley finished, Lewis, the colt's owner, put an arm around the jockey's shoulder. He told him to buck up, told him that getting down off the horse the second after they hit the wire certainly avoided compounding the seriousness of the injury and maybe even saved the colt's life. And they weren't the only two people in the barn fighting back tears.
A few steps away, Lukas himself was struggling to stay on an even keel. He had shed his suit jacket when they brought Charismatic over from the track in an ambulance and now it was impossible to read his eyes behind large-frame aviators tinted gold.
Only six years ago, Lukas lost a horse named Union City in the Preakness, setting off whispers that the horse was not sound going in. The beating he took in the newspapers grew louder in successive years as a string of his top horses ran into problems.
Tabasco Cat, Lukas' 1994 Preakness winner, was retired with a leg injury. Then Flanders, his champion juvenile filly, broke a bone and had to be retired as well. Three more of his best colts, 1995 Preakness winner Timber Country, 1995 Derby winner Thunder Gulch and 1996 Derby champion Grindstone, ran into trouble and had to quit prematurely.
The more people whispered that Lukas was hard on his horses the more it stung. And on this Saturday, when it looked like nothing bad could happen to him, fate had something even more cruel than losing in mind.
He stood off to one side as one of his veterinarians tried to answer questions about Charismatic's future. There was precious little comfort to be had.
"Do horses come back from this?" a reporter asked.
"Oh yeah," Dr. Stephen Selway answered, "but not a lot of them."