USA: After breaking five ribs in a recent accident during trackwork, Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas returned to his normal routine on Thursday morning at Oaklawn Park, atop a stable pony and escorting his horses to and from the track.
Lukas, 87, was working on horseback for the first time since he was bucked off a stable pony during training hours in early December at the Arkansas venue. “I’m sore,” Lukas said in his barn office. “I’m OK if I don’t move.”
Lukas said the injury occurred at his barn when he climbed aboard a different pony, and it was spooked. “I thought I was John Wayne,” Lukas said.
“He jumped forward and when he jumped forward, I had spurs on, so I gripped him with my legs, obviously, trying to stay on him. I spurred him and then the wreck was on. I spurred him every jump after that. It happened right out in front of here. Everybody’s standing there watching.”
Moving from his training chart to a rib chart, Lukas said he “broke” 2, 5, 6, 7 and 8 and “cracked” 9, 10 and 11. Lukas said he was sent to the emergency room at nearby CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs for treatment. Lukas joked about the experience and shunning hospitalization.
“They were going to keep me, but I walked out,” Lukas said. “They had 40, 50 people in emergency. I sat there four hours. The doctor said they [ribs] were pretty badly broken, the ones that were broken.
“He said it would take about 30 minutes to get a bed ready. I said, ‘You don’t need to get a bed ready for me – you’ve got people out here dying right here in front of you.’
“I said, ‘Why don’t you go out there and get one of those 40 that have been there for two days camping out and give them the bed.’ I said, ‘You give them my bed.’”
Lukas’s accident occurred a little less than a year after he was hospitalized at CHI St. Vincent for internal bleeding.
“I’m wondering if Arkansas is for me,” Lukas said. “I love it here, but I don’t like to get banged up when I get here. Internal bleeding was a little worse. I don’t know, though – boy, I was a sore sonuvabitch for the first couple of days. I still am.”
Notorious for dedication to his craft, Lukas returned to ponying horses last season at Oaklawn after being hospitalized.
He said it was more business as usual this December. “I didn’t miss any days’ working,” Lukas said. “I drove over to the front side and trained from there, drove back and forth.”
Lukas, who annually winters in Hot Springs, is the ninth-winningmost trainer in Oaklawn history with 337 victories entering Friday’s card. He was Oaklawn’s leading trainer in 1987 and 2011.
Lukas 40-horse stable in 2022-2023 is headed by Kentucky Oaks winner Secret Oath and boasts more quality and quantity than recent years. A multiple Oaklawn stakes scorer, Secret Oath is scheduled to make her 2023 debut in the G2 Azeri for older fillies and mares on March 11.
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