Sports

Lukas, Stevens: Oxbow can repeat at Belmont Stakes

For the New York Racing Association, NBC Sports and everyone else hoping for a Triple Crown, Derby winner Orb’s defeat in the Preakness was a big letdown. But the cloud had a silver lining.

Who could not smile at the sight of those two old pros in the Pimlico winner’s circle, trainer D. Wayne Lukas, 77, and jockey Gary Stevens, 50, after they turned back the clock with a long shot colt named Oxbow, recapturing the Triple Crown form of yesteryear that earned both men a niche in the Hall of Fame.

“I got congratulatory messages from everybody but NYRA and NBC,” Lukas said jokingly yesterday at a Midtown press conference.

“Like Wayne said, he’s paid to spoil dreams, and I’m the guy he hires to do it,” Stevens said. “He’s always been a huge supporter of mine, and we’ve got a lot of confidence in each other after all these years. It’s about the greatest thing that’s happened in my career as a jockey, coming back and winning for Wayne.”

But their Veterans’ Day Parade isn’t over yet. Lukas and Stevens will team up with Oxbow again in Saturday’s 145th Belmont Stakes, the 1 1/2-mile “Test of the Champion” that Lukas won in 1994 through 1996 and again in 2000, and Stevens took home in 1995, 1998 and 2001.

Lukas owns a record 14 Triple Crown victories, six of those in a row with four different horses, including Tabasco Cat, who took the Preakness-Belmont double in 1994. But then many of his top clients passed away, and Lukas slumped. Before the Preakness, he hadn’t won a classic in 13 years.

“After a while you wonder if you’re going to get another one,” he said. “I didn’t look at [the Preakness] as redemption. I thought we had a horse that was unfortunate in a couple of his races earlier, and we never lost confidence in him. And when I got Gary hooked up with him and we started working together, I felt really good.

“The old guys got it done. I was happier for him than I was for myself.”

Stevens, who hung up his tack in 2005 to pursue a career as an actor and TV racing analyst, came out of retirement in January. Soon after, he got a call from Lukas, who said he had a Derby horse with Stevens’ name on it.

Despite finishing fifth in the Arkansas Derby and sixth in the Kentucky Derby, Stevens did not lose faith in Oxbow, feeling he was getting to know the horse and his abilities.

“I went into the Preakness with a lot of confidence that I was going to get a piece of it, and if something happened to Orb, that we could be the one to beat,” he said. “[Oxbow] not only stepped forward, but he took two steps forward that day. It reminds me a lot of a horse that surprised me back in 1995, Thunder Gulch (winner of the Derby and Belmont for Lukas and Stevens), who just got right at the right time, and I believe is still developing.”

As for the Belmont, Lukas said: “The three most important ingredients in a race horse are speed, speed and speed. How you can develop that and what you can do with it are what makes winning race horses. Whenever you have a horse with natural speed like Oxbow has, he gets into a high cruising speed, and they’re always dangerous, whether it’s the length of a corn cob or a mile-and-a-half.

“His stride in the last 100 yards [of the Preakness] was better than any place in the race, and he gallops out pretty strong, which gives us some confidence in that area. I think we’re going to send a better-prepared horse mentally in the Belmont than we did in the Preakness. Whether he’s a faster horse or a winning horse remains to be seen.”