Frankie Dettori shocked the racing world by saying he intends to retire after at the end of 2023 after a ‘farewell tour’. In this brilliant appreciation of an iconic global talent, Steve Dennis charts the ups and downs of a high-profile career
GB: Never is a small word with big connotations, but perhaps there has never been another jockey quite like Frankie Dettori, 52, who has just announced that he will call time on the most glorious, most lapidary of careers at the end of 2023.
There have been many more prolific jockeys, and plenty of riders who have won more major races, and a good many who have been considered his superior. But no-one else has managed the blend of sheer brilliance on the track and high celebrity off the track that has characterised Dettori’s time among us.
He was born in a well-known city in northern Italy but, in the words of the song, he has always been too sexy for Milan. Dettori has been box-office famous, a showman like no other, racing’s laughing, grinning, buoyant cavalier even when – like all the best entertainers – he was dealing with the darkness of his demons.
Racing – all sport – is at heart a numbers game, so let’s take the abacus down from the shelf and set the beads whirring. Dettori rode his first winner at Turin racecourse in November 1986, and has barely let up the pace ever since. He has ridden 3,336 winners in Britain, placing him fifth in the all-time list behind Sir Gordon Richards, Pat Eddery, Lester Piggott and Willie Carson, and hundreds more around the world.
He has ridden 21 British Classic winners – Piggott’s record is 30 – and 282 G1 winners, which includes 14 at the Breeders’ Cup. There have been 77 victories at Royal Ascot, three British jockeys’ championships and one apprentice title, seven wins from seven rides on one indelible day at Ascot, a record six wins in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, four in the Dubai World Cup, three in the Japan Cup, two in the Derby, and for good measure he also bred a winner of the Queen Mother Champion Chase at the Cheltenham Festival.
Public property
The names of the great horses he has partnered are legion. Pick six, perhaps – Dubai Millennium, Daylami, Sakhee, Enable, Stradivarius, Lammtarra – and you leave out many champions and countless household names, and all this untrammelled excelsior of success has come while he has been public property, usually willingly but occasionally unwillingly, the going rate for celebrity in the 21st century. When he rides off into the sunset for the final time, no-one will ever be able to say, “Frankie, we hardly knew ya.
Pedigree is the linchpin of Flat racing, and Dettori was bred to be both a jockey and the centre of attention at the big show – his father Gianfranco was 13-time champion jockey in Italy and his mother Iris Maria was a trapeze artist who also stood on horses’ backs as they cantered around the circus ring. This apple fell right next to the tree.
Dettori’s life and career resembles a sine wave, every up followed rapidly by a down, swiftly followed by an up. He moved to Britain in 1985 and won the apprentice – ‘bugboy’, for a US audience – title four years later, but shot to a prominence he has never relinquished at the age of 19, when winning his first two G1s within the space of 45 minutes at Ascot in September 1990.
In those days press conferences were not the polished, banal affairs they are today. All the journalists crammed into a small room in the bowels of Ascot’s old grandstand and Dettori climbed onto a wooden chair and held forth, running his hands through his impossibly luxurious mop of hair and beaming like, well, like a 19-year-old who had just begun the conquering of the world. We hacks were enchanted, entranced. We knew he’d go far. We never believed he’d go this far.
Unflinching self-awareness
But what goes up on to the rickety wooden chair must come down flat on its face on the floor, and like so many before him and afterwards Dettori soon fell under the wheels of fame’s relentless bandwagon. In a recent and highly confessional interview for the Big Issue, a British publication, Dettori was unflinching in his self-awareness.
“By the time I was 22 I had turned into a dickhead,” he said. “I lost it, completely lost it. I loved the bright lights, loved the party and loved the drugs. I loved the women. I loved the entourage. I just completely f***ing lost it.”
He was arrested for using cocaine in 1993, and received a police caution. He had been riding for the Queen, and it takes little imagination to conjure up the headlines. His career trajectory wobbled, dipped. Up and down, then up again.
The following year he was champion for the first time, retained his crown 12 months later, and then in September 1996 he attained his absolute zenith when he rode all seven winners – the fabled ‘Magnificent Seven’ – on a hugely prestigious day at Ascot, his spiritual racecourse.
The importance of that heavenly septet of winners is crucial to the Dettori legend. It made him, forever, defining him as a person as well as a jockey.
After his final victory aboard Fujiyama Crest – who Dettori would later purchase and bless with a life-of-Riley retirement – he performed his flying dismount (stolen from Angel Cordero, who stole it from Avelino Gomez, who may or may not have initiated it) and ran madly around the winner’s enclosure spraying the crowd with champagne, as if they weren’t intoxicated enough by what had just taken place.
Before that day, Dettori was admired and loved by the racing public. After that, he was untouchable, beyond the normal vagaries of affection. Frankie was Frankie, bigger than racing itself. He opened a chain of pizza restaurants, he was a team captain on a TV sports quiz show, he was to the apocryphal man in the street the only embodiment of a sport that had lacked a public figure since the very, very, very different Piggott had retired.
Global phenomenon
It was the beginning of the Godolphin years, during which Dettori became not just a British phenomenon but a global one. Yet his life, like the course of true love, never ran completely smoothly. Up/down/up. In 2000 his light aeroplane crashed in Newmarket, killing the pilot. Dettori was saved from death only by the bravery of fellow jockey and passenger Ray Cochrane, who dragged him from the wreckage, and the mental scars took years to heal.
In 2007 he won the Derby for the first time; in 2012 he fell from grace at Godolphin, losing his retainer, and was banned for six months after testing positive for cocaine when riding in France. He was 42. Surely that was ‘game over’.
It looked that way the following year when he participated in the trashy TV show Celebrity Big Brother; Marlon Brando in the jungle, a mighty titan going terribly wrong in plain sight. That year he rode just 16 winners. Yet … two years later he won a second Derby on Golden Horn, escaping like Houdini from the chains of his flaws and failings and returning to his position as the brightest light in racing’s firmament, going on to enjoy a remarkably fruitful second coming as stable jockey to John Gosden.
Immortal sporting career
More than anything else, Dettori is a survivor, a rubber ball of a man who has always bounced back. He has made it through, coming out the other side of a remarkable and immortal sporting career with his talent and his position in the public’s affection largely intact.
He rides much less often nowadays, saving himself for the big occasions, and although there has been the inevitable diminishing that comes with age – the reflexes possibly not what they were, the trackcraft less instinctive than before – he is still one of the best jockeys in the world.
Now for the last and long goodbye, a year that will be spent picking cherries from the fruitbowl of the racing world, every milestone – the last time in Dubai, the last Derby, Royal Ascot, Arc, Champions Day, Breeders’ Cup – cherished and slightly overwrought with emotion on his way to the end of the racing road.
He will start the journey at sunny Santa Anita this month and finish it there at the Breeders’ Cup next November, arguably the greatest international jockey we’ve ever seen bestriding the globe one last time.
British racing will miss him terribly. Dettori is literally irreplaceable, as despite the obvious talent of William Buick, Oisin Murphy, Hollie Doyle and all the rest there is no-one with the public profile, no-one with the wider connection, no-one with that irrepressible blend of glamour and genius that has characterised Dettori from almost the very start.
British racing is practically at its lowest ebb anyway, and a Dettori-less future is – although completely predictable – another worrying augury for the coming years.
He has said that he has no wish to be a trainer. Not enough spotlight, not the right temperament. Dettori’s future lies in the media, as a racing pundit, as a television personality, a star of stage and screen a little like a modern-day Tod ‘Yankee Doodle’ Sloan, box-office to the end, prime-time funtime Frankie.
“I’ve had an absolutely amazing career and loved every second of it,” he told interviewer Lee Mottershead of the Racing Post. “But you have to know when to let go, and I want to stop at the top.”
Up, down, up, down, up. He’s timed it perfectly. The great entertainer leaves the stage, leaving us wanting more, knowing there’ll never be another show like it.
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