Nearly 40 years after riding his first winner, Frankie Dettori yesterday had his last leg-ups, signing off a rollercoaster riding career with a collection of mounts in Brazil.
So, this is it then. This time (almost certainly) for good. On Sunday, Frankie Dettori, three-time British champion jockey and winner of hundreds of global Group or Graded prizes, hung up his boots on one of the biggest days not in the European, nor even the American, racing calendar, but on a day of two Group 1s in Rio de Janeiro.
But that this comparatively muted final farewell should’ve come far from fans and former employers in Europe, where the 55-year-old was born (in Italy) and where (in Britain, winning almost all its Group 1s) he made his name, doesn’t tell the whole story.
Though he rode on for two years with some success in the States, Dettori waved goodbye his adopted homeland on British Champions Day in October 2023, guiding, in his final race, King Of Steel to Champion Stakes glory. He never rode in Europe again.
Ascot spectators, in their tens of thousands, transformed the royal racecourse to a soccer-style stadium with chants of “ooh, Frankie Dettori”, beamed to countless viewers. A statue of Dettori on horseback had been unveiled at the track earlier in the day.
His year-long ‘farewell tour’ of selected tracks in Great Britain, along with a splattering of others – large and small – in Ireland and on the continent ended a tumultuous journey that had started in Milan just over half a century earlier.
He was born the child of a circus performer and an almost all-conquering (in Italy at least) jockey who, it seems, requested or otherwise, has never ceased to proffer both advice and criticism to his progeny and prodigy, even when his son was at the height of success.
A leg-up from Cumani
Dettori’s parents divorced when he was tiny and footballing dreams didn’t last long, his attention turning equine when presented with a pony and asked to look after it. He left school a young teenager and, not long later, despite possessing barely a word of English, was sent to the Newmarket yard of compatriot Luca Cumani.
It was for Cumani that he served his apprenticeship, fast making a mark and learning, during a stint in California in the charge of Richard Cross, what would become his signature flying dismount.
In 1993, however, after he’d definitively announced himself with a raft of Group 1s, including at Royal Ascot, came the first of his lows. A contract in Hong Kong was called off when, that April, he was cautioned for cocaine possession.
Already fired by Cumani, who’d been kept in the dark about the Hong Kong relocation, Dettori found himself a freelancer but, by the end of the season, had been signed to ride Sheikh Mohammed’s John Gosden-trained runners.
His first British Classics and Breeders’ Cup victories came calling before, on 28th September 1996, at the meeting that served as something of a precursor to British Champions Day, where he’d have his aforementioned European finale three decades or so later, Dettori rode all seven winners on the card, transitioning, in so doing, from racing celebrity to celebrity at large.
Television work followed, as did a cookbook, a line in frozen food and promotion of a chain of ‘Frankie’s Italian Bar & Grill’ restaurants. Wheeled through hospital in the summer of 2000, recovering from a plane crash that had claimed the life of his pilot, he was met by the flashing bulbs of a bank of photographers. He was awarded an honorary MBE in 2001.
The third and final of his champion jockey titles came in 2004, and by 2012 it was time for another low.
First, in a move surely hastened by Dettori having taken a ride on Camelot, for Coolmore, in that year’s Arc, his Godolphin contract came to an end. Then, that December, he received a six-month suspension after failing a drugs test in France. He confessed to having taken cocaine.
The Gosden years
But racing was not done with Dettori yet; nor he with it. His penultimate, decade-long, chapter was to be dominated by a partnership with John Gosden which seemingly both floundered and was mended in 2022, the year he announced his retirement… only to do a U-turn the following autumn and reveal a move to California.
As he left for his final chapter across the ocean, in Britain they drew breath, only for it to filter through, in the winter of 2024, that Dettori had been battling HMRC (Britain’s tax collectors) for anonymity after use of an avoidance scheme. A few months later, he announced he’d filed for bankruptcy. This month, it was revealed he’d likely be unable to repay a £765,000 debt.
And so, his riding career (a job as Amo Racing’s global ambassador is lined up) closed not only under the statue of Christ the Redeemer, but also under something of a small cloud.
The riding journey of the greatest jockey, surely, to be exported by Italy and certainly one of the most exuberant jockeys to have faced the British public, ended with a faded faraway flourish.
And here's what the Brazilian-born legend João 'Magic Man' Moreira said about Dettori that month.
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