On the Thursday morning before the Preakness, the Alibi Breakfast is annually held in one of the few galleries at old Pimlico that could still be spruced up. The top trainers, riders, organizers and deep-pocketed backers are invited to talk about their horses and perhaps sling a few playful barbs.

The last few years, there was really only one person that every media member — tasked with manufacturing an interesting story out of this breakfast — longed to see grab the mic and reel off one-liners.

D. Wayne Lukas.

He dressed the part of ‘80s oil millionaire with Stetson hats and expensive suits, but the real charm of Lukas was his folksy sense of humor. He teased his rival Bob Baffert constantly, saying the eight-time Preakness winner should amble down to his side of the barn so Lukas could teach him how to train a horse. During a press conference, his flip phone rang — a huge faux pas — but he made the whole room erupt in laughter when he said: “Hold on, that’s probably Bill Gates.”

He told off-color jokes, too, that felt perhaps ill-suited to a more politically correct age. After winning the 2024 Preakness with Seize the Grey, he told a story about chewing out jockey Jaime Torres after a bad race: “I told him you’re gonna be back in Puerto Rico picking oranges if you ride like that.” But when you’re an octogenarian, the audience tends to be a little more forgiving.

That was Lukas, the life of the party, the quote machine with enough of a winning pedigree, even into his late eighties, to justify the attention.

Lukas died Saturday night at his home in Louisville, Kentucky, surrounded by family. Though he slipped off quietly to the other side, his legacy will forever be defined by how loudly and vivaciously he lived — and in Maryland, how important he made the Preakness feel.

For one week of the year, Maryland racing fans got as big a dose of Lukas as they wanted. He drew the news media in with the nectar of his quips. Those in the industry revered him because of how much he won for how long. For the casual fan, he cut an arresting figure — riding out to the track every morning before dawn to personally oversee how his horses were running, mounted on a spotted stable pony that was almost as distinctive as his aviator sunglasses.

Lukas was a larger-than-life personality to everyone around horse racing, and he made the Preakness — often viewed even in the industry as the less-loved middle child of the Triple Crown — seem like a worthy event of someone of his stature.

If you talked to Lukas over the last few years, he was a staunch defender of the Preakness and Pimlico even as the track infrastructure crumbled and racing’s future in the state looked shaky. He loved the historic Preakness barns, advocating that they be kept exactly as is, even as plans advanced for the entire facility to be razed.

“I’m going to really miss it,” Lukas said this May when the race was run at Old Hilltop for the last time before the track is torn down and rebuilt. “It’s the easiest one. Baffert and I talk from time to time about how it’s the most fun one of all the three Triple Crown races. Sharing that stakes barn as we do, Pimlico just makes it awfully easy. It seems like it all falls into place.”

Lukas was as much a fixture at Preakness as any of the buildings. Phoebe Hayes, who runs horsemen relations for the Maryland Jockey Club, said Lukas always requested the same stalls at the far end of the Preakness barn every year he ran the race. (She wryly noted that in years when Lukas didn’t run a horse at Pimlico, Baffert would snag his favored stalls instead.)

Even in years when some trainers would wait until the day before (or even the day of) the race to flock to Baltimore, Lukas almost always spent a full week of preparation. With seven Preakness winners between 1980 and 2024, you couldn’t argue with the process.

“If Wayne was at Preakness, we knew where he’d be — on that same bench at the end of the barn,” Hayes said. “Wayne didn’t dodge the bullet. He brought his owners to Baltimore. He came because he knew they’d have a good time, and that it’d be very special to be a part of the event.”

Skip the Preakness? It’s become a popular move in recent years as trainers who are conscious of resting their runners try to win the Kentucky Derby without contemplating a bid for the Triple Crown. Derby winner Sovereignty skipped the middle leg this year, taking some juice out of the field.

But Lukas never looked down on Preakness or Pimlico, heralding the intimacy of the setting that brought the trainers closer together in the week leading up to the race.

Former Pimlico owner Joe De Francis recalled in the early ‘90s when Chrysler executives were touring the track during a time when the Preakness was trying to keep a grasp on the car company’s race sponsorship. De Francis mentioned to Lukas that he could use some assistance keeping the executives happy. Lukas proceeded to hold court with them for the next 90 minutes, keeping them guffawing with his endless storytelling.

“He had them eating out of the palm of his hand, and the whole time they were slapping each other on the back,” De Francis remembered. “By the time he was done, they floated out of the clubhouse.”

Lukas once boasted that in every single one of his Preakness wins, he had brought a different owner to town. In the last of these victories, Lukas won for more than 2,500 owners. Micro-share company MyRacehorse sold small stakes in Seize the Grey, and though the winner’s circle scene was rowdy and chaotic, Lukas lapped it up.

“Well, I’ll tell you what: They really turned ‘em loose,” he said. “I’ve been in some cattle drives that have been more organized than that.”

But what meant more to him then was the respect of the rival trainers he received while winning, including Baffert and Kenny McPeek. “As I came out of the grandstand and across the racetrack, every one of those guys that was in that race stopped to give me a handshake,” he said. “That meant more to me than any single thing.”

He began his career as an upstart and disruptor, among the first to fly horses to races, to run barns like franchises, to dress with expensive, designer flair. Whereas in the ‘80s he was a polarizing figure, by the 2020s, he was a living legend that exacted a gravitational pull on everyone in racing.

“You gotta be a pretty cranky person not to root for someone in their 80s still getting up every morning to train,” De Francis said. “When people realized Wayne wasn’t a flash in the pan, what started out as envy from other trainers probably turned to grudging respect to genuine affection.”

Lukas knew what it was to be an outsider at the start of his career. Maybe that’s why he showed so much grace to Pimlico over the decades he came to visit. Everyone in Maryland appreciated it deeply.

“We loved when he had a horse for the Preakness,” said Georganne Hale, a longtime executive at the Maryland Jockey Club. “He would ship in early, we all would wait patiently for his trailer to arrive with the horses. He would get the horses settled in, and proceed to sit in his chair in his regular corner of the Preakness barn, telling stories to everyone who was there to greet him.”

The upcoming detour of Preaknesses through Laurel was always going to feel disruptive and odd, but with Lukas’ death, the transition feels even more abrupt. While Pimlico has been long in need of repair and renovation, it was always a perfect stage for one of racing’s greatest showmen — a man who helped elevate the race and its pageantry by the power of his personality.

At next year’s Alibi Breakfast, it would be astute for organizers to leave an empty place setting in Lukas’ honor. There’s nobody else who can quite fill that seat.

“He was a tireless ambassador for horse racing,” De Francis said. “I will miss him greatly personally, and the sport will miss him greatly.”