Lukas Reaches Milestone : Horse racing: Criminal Type’s victory in the Pimlico Special pushes trainer over $100-million mark in career purses.

When Criminal Type won the Pimlico Special on Saturday, Wayne Lukas had reached a milestone that once would have seemed unimaginable. His horses now have earned more than $100 million in purse money.

Lukas triumphed in Maryland’s richest race for the same reason he has scored so many other big-money successes in his amazing 12-year career as a thoroughbred trainer: He understands and appreciates the importance of speed.

The former quarter-horse trainer buys horses who are bred for speed and loves to utilize it. While other members of his profession tend to approach major races with cautious tactics, Lukas never hestitates to tell a jockey to be aggressive as soon as the gate opens.

And Saturday it was the tactics of Jose Santos, more than any other factor, that enabled Criminal Type to wear down Ruhlmann and win the $1 million Special by a neck. His time of 1:53 for 1 3-16 miles, the Preakness distance, broke the track record by one-fifth of a second.

Ruhlmann is blazingly fast, and he has scored virtually all of his stakes victories in California by leading all the way. Rival trainers and jockeys often figure it would be suicidal to try to go head and head with him in the early stages of a race. This is exactly what the jockeys of the other contenders in the Special were thinking. Only Criminal Type was prepared to challenge the front runner -- and he was rewarded for his aggressivness.

“We wanted someone else to chase Ruhlmann,” Lukas said, “but it looked to be like there wasn’t anyone capable. I told Jose, ‘If nobody puts pressure on that horse, don’t let him get away.’ I didn’t want another Santa Anita Handicap.” In that race, the richest on the West Coast, Ruhlmann had coasted to the lead without any pressure and Lukas’s horse had to settle for second money.

As soon as the gate opened, Ruhlmann and jockey Gary Stevens were in front of their nine rivals. Criminal Type had been bumped at the start and was lagging for a few strides, but as Santos saw the way the race was developing he knew what he had to do. Chris McCarron wasn’t asking for speed from the favorite, Opening Verse. The quick filly, Gorgeous, wasn’t showing her customary speed at all.

“When I looked down to the inside,” Santos said, “I didn’t see Gorgeous. I knew I had to go after him right away.”

So Santos urged his horse and drew almost abreast of Ruhlmann at the first turn. Ruhlmann shook him off at that point, but Santos kept pushing and wouldn’t let the front-runner get more than a length or two in front of him. They loped the first half mile in 46 4-5 seconds, a leisurely pace over this fast track. (Half an hour later, allowance-class horses covered the first half mile of a distance race in the identical time.) After such a slow pace, the leaders were going to be strong at the finish and, indeed, the Special was developing into a two-horse race.

On the final turn, the horses who had been hanging behind the two leaders attempted belatedly to make their moves. Opening Verse had been sitting patiently in third place; now McCarron swung to the outside and went to the whip. But he couldn’t gain, because Ruhlmann and Criminal Type were in high gear too. They had covered the third quarter-mile in a sizzling :23 4-5. Now they were speeding the fourth quarter in :23 4-5 again. It would be impossible to make up much ground on horses moving so fast.

Ruhlmann seemed to shake off Criminal Type again when they turned into the stretch, and Stevens was feeling confident. “When I asked my horse at the head of the stretch,” he said, “he really responded. We were very comfortable on the lead.”

But Criminal Type made one final surge in the last sixteenth of a mile-and this time he wore down the leader. “He got by me about 50 yards from the wire,” Stevens said. “They had to break the track record to beat him, but he ran a super race.”

(The old mark had been set by Blushing John in last year’s second modern running of the Special.)

Long shot De Roche rallied to finish third, 1 1/4 lengths behind the runner-up, with Mi Selecto fourth and Opening Verse fifth.

Criminal Type, a 5-year-old son of Alydar, paid $17.40 to win, but the day’s most notable payoff was the $600,000 he received for winning the first $1 million race ever run in the state. The purse money boosted Lukas’s total to somewhere around the $100,300,000 mark. The trainer, who is almost unconscious of his own statistics, said he had checked with his accountant this morning and learned that he was $302,000 behind the magic figure. Of course, Lukas runs so many horses at so many different tracks that he will be adding to this record day by day, and often hour by hour.