Specht changes plans, delays retirement

Arrangements were made. The news was shared with clients and colleagues. Plans were set to disperse the horses to different stables.

Then, Steve Specht, longtime trainer on the Northern California, reversed course. Retirement was not happening, at least not in the summer of 2024.

“I had called it quits,” Specht recalled earlier this month. “I told everybody I was done.

“I got down to it and I thought, I can’t do this.”

The lure of everyday life in the sport was too strong.

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“It’s tough to walk away from something you’ve been doing for 55 years,” he continued. “I don’t want to quit yet. I’m getting a little long in the tooth. I can still do it.”

Specht, who through Thursday has won 1,569 races, has horses in two of the eight races at the Sonoma county fair in Santa Rosa on Friday and runners in four of the nine races on Saturday.

His most recent win was Keep Movin’ On in the $95,700 Robert Dupret Derby at Santa Rosa last Saturday, the stable’s 24th victory of the year. Keep Movin’ On, who races for owner and breeder Tom Bachman, will be considered for races throughout the state, Specht said.

Specht, 74, is on course to surpass his 35-win season in 2023. With a successful autumn, he could challenge the recent totals of 48 wins from 2021 or 40 from 2022.

Specht is not limited to racing in Northern California. Since June 2023, Specht has won four stakes at Santa Anita with the outstanding California-bred filly Grand Slam Smile.

After the Santa Rosa meeting ends on Sunday, Specht will have a quiet month. He will focus on the day-to-day operation of his stable at the Alameda county fairgrounds in Pleasanton in preparations for autumn meetings at Fresno and Pleasanton. This summer, Pleasanton has taken the role of a year-round hub for Northern California racing since the permanent closure of Golden Gate Fields in early June.

Specht will not have runners at the tiny Humboldt county fair in Ferndale in far Northern California when that track’s three-week meeting begins on Aug 23.

“Ferndale is not happening,” he said.

Fresno begins at five-week meeting on the weekend of Sept. 13. A two-month autumn meeting at Pleasanton will begin in late October, replacing dates previously run at Golden Gate Fields.

Specht, who began training in 1969, has been based in Northern California since the early 1980s. He won four Grade 3 stakes at Golden Gate Fields from 2003 to 2017, and the $1 million Sunshine Millions Classic at Gulfstream Park in 2007 with the California-bred McCann’s Mojave.

With retirement no longer imminent, Specht is looking forward to the fall, contingent on the continuation of racing in Northern California.

“Maybe if they shut down racing in Northern California,” he said of really retiring.

“I’ll keep plugging away.”

Getting close to such a decision, and realizing how it would have altered his life, led to a change of heart.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I thought, what am I doing.

“There’s not much else I’m qualified for.”

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