Becker focused on future after milestone achievement

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. – It took trainer Scott Becker just 10 years to amass 1,000 wins, but the irony is that the milestone, hit last week at Fairmount Park, comes during Becker’s slowest season since 2010.

That was Becker’s first full year officially running an operation after he got the job as the de facto private trainer for Bill Stiritz midway through 2009. Stiritz, a business executive and owner of Fairmount Park since 2000, is a plum client. Stiritz breeds to race, buys horses at auction, and plays the claiming game, and after partnering with Becker he ramped up his participation in all phases of the sport.

Becker won 72 races in 2010, 93 in 2011, and has been over 100 every full year since, peaking at 158 wins in 2015. Just last year Becker won 120 races, Stiritz 116, but those numbers have tumbled in 2018. So far this year Becker has 51 winners from 212 starters and he has been far less active at the Arlington meeting than in past years. Through Aug. 26, Becker has just 10 winners from 68 Arlington runners after winning between 25 and 40 races on well over 100 starters here the last three seasons. At Fairmount, Becker has 27 winners from 87 runners, comparable to his last two seasons there.

Becker said Stiritz has about the same number of horses as in recent seasons and that two major factors have tamped down his activity the last several months.

“I can’t get enough races around Illinois,” he said. “I can’t get the horses in. They write all these conditions I think are crazy, and if you have open horses you don’t get to run. I’m down in tarts but not really down in horses.”

Becker has a bumper crop of 28 2-year-olds, but his juvenile program took a hit when a virus ran through the Fairmount string and set back nearly all the young horses.

“It was just a little upper respiratory thing, but a bunch of them got sick on me and I lost a month’s time with them,” he said. “I was behind the eight ball a little, but we’re caught up to speed a little now.”

Becker hopes to run a number of those 2-year-olds at the Hawthorne meet this fall and is seriously contemplating a winter move to Florida. Becker and Stiritz had a string at Oaklawn for several years and the last two winters have stabled at Fair Grounds, but Becker said he has several Florida-bred 2-year-olds this year, and that he recently applied for stalls at Gulfstream Park.

One thousand wins in 10 years does not mean a horse trainer gets to rest on his laurels.