Flatter: A Preakness 2025 alibi breakfast unlike any other

Baltimore

The time machine took a delightful turn this week, back to when the clubhouse was opened at Pimlico. The new one. Circa 1960.

For what has been proclaimed to be the last Preakness to be run at old Pimlico before it is torn down, there was one last alibi breakfast. What had become a dowdy shadow of its former self sprung back to life Thursday morning.

With apologies to 26-year-old Griffin Johnson, the man of 10 million TikTok followers, the show was stolen by the new, young comedy team sitting a few tables away. They may as well have been called Bob and the Coach.

“I thought this was the alibi,” said Bob Baffert, 72, the younger of the two. “We’re supposed to be talking about why our horses didn’t run in the Derby.”

He was feigning protest about his role as the straight man to 89-year-old D. Wayne Lukas. Give him a microphone and a live audience of several hundred people, and stand by for an old-school roast that is at once appropriate for the room even if it provokes a thrill ride on the edge of political correctness.

“We’ve got a great cross-section of different people here,” Lukas said for openers. “For example, (Gosger’s trainer) Brendan Walsh from Ireland gives us a little flavor there. I asked him why is it that the Irish got all the potatoes, and the Arabs got all the oil? And he said, ‘The Irish had first choice.’ ”

“Here we go,” Baffert said through the laughs. “Here we go. It’s coming.”

The room felt absent of the stuffed shirts who would bristle at this sort of thing, and Baffert was quite comfortable playing along with Lukas.

“You’ve got to watch out for this Mark Casse,” Lukas said when he eyed Sandman’s name in the program. “He’s won the Sovereign Award as the leading trainer in Canada about 35 times or something.”

“What happens in Canada stays in Canada,” Baffert said. “You can’t play Vegas. It doesn’t count here.”

“I always worry about Mike. Mark. What’s your name?” Lukas said.

“You know I have won the Preakness, right?” Casse said. “From the 1 hole.”

“We were talking about that a year ago,” Lukas said.

The story goes that the Preakness alibi breakfast started during the Great Depression on the veranda of the original clubhouse that burned down in 1966. If it sounded anything like the 2025 renewal, then it is clear why what started as a swapping of lies among horsemen turned into such a great tradition.

There is a simpler, more modern way of putting it. The alibi breakfast is all about busting balls. So, too, is having almost every Preakness horse in the same stakes barn. That means every trainer is in there, too. It is not for the thin of skin.

“I just want you guys to all understand. What we’re putting up with right now, we put up the entire week,” Casse said. “That’s the great thing about the Preakness. We’re all in the same barn, so I have to listen to this every day.”

Casse said Lukas never tells the same joke twice. Anyone who has heard Lukas at an alibi breakfast or a post-position draw or a news conference after a victory would have a hard time finding a reheated one-liner.

“He’s a master of jokes,” Casse said. “But then I’ve got to listen to Bob. I’d say, oh, a good restaurant, and he’d say, ‘What would you know? You live in Ocala.’ This is what I deal with. It’s been going on for a long time.”

In and around debating whether trainer Michael McCarthy should have put Kentucky Derby runner-up Journalism in the barn stall reserved for the absent Derby winner Sovereign, Lukas and Baffert took no prisoners.

Just in from England, Heart of Honor’s trainer Jamie Osborne got his first taste of a Lukas roasting Thursday. But he had heard it before from Baffert, who won the controversial 2014 Breeders’ Cup Classic with Bayern holding off Osborne’s 18-1 long shot Toast of New York. Osborne had it seared in his memory.

“All you said was, ‘What was that horse that finished second trained by that Brit that looks like Austin Powers?’ ”

Asked what kind of advice he had for Osborne, Lukas said, “Stay at home.”

And then Lukas doubled down.

“Let’s be realistic,” he said. “You can’t ship a horse halfway across the world and put your daughter on it. I mean it’s a publicity stunt.”

Osborne’s daughter Saffie is an accomplished jockey across the Atlantic. When Lukas heard she is 23, it was like putting a baseball on a batting tee.

“How long has she been riding?” he asked Osborne.

“A couple of weeks.”

“Bob’s got a bunch of sons.”

“I wouldn’t wish her on my worst enemy.”

The fact that Osborne and Casse and Johnson and so many other connections and their friends actually showed up to the alibi breakfast was a real throwback to the good ol’ days at Pimlico, long before debates raged over the spacing of Triple Crown races and how and when to mothball the old joint.

My friend John Scheinman, the Eclipse Award-winning writer who ought to be made the mayor of Pimlico, wrote a BloodHorse story two years ago ruing the erosion of the annual breakfast.

“Powerful participants can’t be bothered to do more than bring over a fancy horse and hope to get the money and get out of town, on to the next pillaging,” Scheinman wrote. Maybe he shamed them into showing up. Most did Thursday.

One table traditionally is reserved for each Preakness horse’s team. Baffert, who has Goal Oriented, sat at the American Promise table, because that is where Lukas was. It was not just his acquiescing to seniority. Lukas won this thing last year with Seize the Grey.

“We need to keep this thing, because this is what racing looks forward to,” Baffert said of the traditions that include the five-week window for the Triple Crown which he has won twice. “It’s historical, and to wait 37 years for (American) Pharoah to do it and come back and watch Justify do it, it’s really exciting for people watching horse racing.”

Lukas could not help but stare down his good friend Baffert and offer one droll, punctuating shot.

“Brought me to tears,” he said. “That was good, Bob. You rehearsed that well.”

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below and at RonFlatterRacingPod@gmail.com are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.