Steve Specht motors to Santa Anita this week with a trailer full of well-trained horses and untamed emotions. The three horses come from Golden Gate Fields to compete on Saturday’s program of stakes for California-breds, led by a tenacious 3-year-old filly named Grand Slam Smile. The emotions come from what’s happening to racing back in Northern California, where Specht, 74, is the dean of thoroughbred trainers but unsure how much longer he’ll hang on.
“I don’t want to (retire),” Specht said on the phone from his barn at Golden Gate Fields, in Albany, Calif. “They’re kind of forcing it on me.” “They” are the racetrack operators and regulators who Specht sees making life difficult for him and others in California racing, especially San Francisco Bay Area racing.
If you want to understand the pain racetrackers there are feeling these days, listen to Specht. He’ll put it bluntly and sometimes profanely, with the occasional apology for ranting too long. The hurt begins with the end of Golden Gate Fields, now scheduled to close after the races of June 9, a little later but no less permanently than was originally scheduled under a plan announced in July 2023 by the Stronach Group.
For Specht, shifting operations to Northern California’s new racing hub at the Alameda County Fairgrounds track in Pleasanton would be hard for practical reasons. It’s a 56-mile drive from where he and his wife Nancy live in Santa Rosa to Golden Gate, and after 33 years he can .