Rajan Bala, one of a rare kind

 There can never be another Frankie

 

This Is Your Life, one of British television’s most popular programmes until it closed in 2003, in November 1998 featured Frankie Dettori. Friends, family and celebrities clambered on stage to embrace and pay homage to the star of the show who always had to be ‘safe’ enough to have their CV exposed.  Frankie qualified, just: one of the ‘friends’ was the fabled, occasionally notorious, professional punter Barney Curley.

 

 

By Rolf Johnson

 

This Is Your Life, one of British television’s most popular programmes until it closed in 2003, in November 1998 featured Frankie Dettori. Friends, family and celebrities clambered on stage to embrace and pay homage to the star of the show who always had to be ‘safe’ enough to have their CV exposed.  Frankie qualified, just: one of the ‘friends’ was the fabled, occasionally notorious, professional punter Barney Curley.

 

Some would say in 1998, when Dettori was just twenty-eight, his ‘life’, his career was still taking off. There were another twenty-four years to come before he has just announced 2023 will be his last season in the saddle. He hadn’t ridden a Derby winner at the time and though he’d twice been champion jockey and two years earlier ridden his ‘Magnificent Seven’ - through the card of winners at Ascot - it was another two years before he received royal recognition with an MBE: through various trials and tribulations he has hung on to title; Lester Piggott was stripped of his OBE and that was never restored.

And just two years later he was lucky to escape a plane crash with his life.

 

Drugs bans and other skirmishes were yet to taint Dettori or threaten his status of “National Treasure” a title afforded to the few who are forgiven their foibles. As early as his twenty-second birthday he said he’d “lost it” he’d fallen for life’s mischievous revenge on the impossibly precocious and was going off the rails. But such introspection didn’t inhibit him for long.

 

The six-month ban for drug abuse that, in 2012, coincided with the termination of eighteen-years as retained jockey, the first, for Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed’s all-conquering Godolphin operation. The separation prompted ‘obituaries’ for his career.

 

It wasn’t of course and it has mattered not a jot that for the past ten years he has come nowhere near a hundred winning rides: in 1994 that total was 233. But the Group One’s have continued to pile up – to date 282 of them; and 21 classics; over three thousand winners and counting continue to decorate a stellar career.

 

Dettori’s ‘debut’ was in a children’s pony race at the San Siro in Milan when he finished last. Taken on as fourteen-year-old by fellow Italian, Newmarket trainer Luca Cumani, he hadn’t a word of English. But even underage to be allowed to gamble, the prodigy was sufficiently sharp-witted to win, in a Newmarket betting shop, nearly £2000 on West Tip in the 1986 Grand National.

Of course, Dettori’s inherent impetuosity took over and soon losses obliged him to become a ‘chalk jockey’ a term applied to tyro riders yet to have a painted name board and whose name is ‘chalked’ up. In fact, it was Frankie who had to do the chalking –  in a Newmarket High Street betting shop, chalking the names of runners and their odds – in the days before electronic displays made ‘boardmen’ redundant.

 

Frankie’s father was thirteen-time champion jockey of Italy; his mother had been a circus bareback rider. Maybe that’s where he got his daring flying dismounts? No, he pinched that act off an American jockey. Nobody dares ape Dettori.

 

Frankie Dettori, aged 52, the world’s highest profile jockey, has let it be known that a career that began with a first victory at the age of sixteen (on Lizzy Hare at Goodwood in 1987) will blaze through 2023 before it burns out at the Breeders’ Cup in Santa Anita, California, late in the year. There will be a triumphal world tour: there’s unfinished business not least in India where he has yet to shine.

 

In 1994 when Sheikh Mohammed, ruler of Dubai, created his Godolphin operation with the intention of conquering the racing world, Dettori was made an offer he couldn’t refuse to become the Sheikh’s accomplice in the realization of the ambition.

 

Four years on came the horse that some say has never been surpassed in the blue Godolphin silks – Dubai Millennium on whom Dettori won the world’s richest race the Dubai World Cup. Then came the plane crash: Frankie Dettori has that essential attribute to complement genius – he’s a survivor.

 

Success begat success for Godolphin – though no Derby - and by 2012 when he chose to ride Camelot in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe for his boss’s arch rivals Coolmore, the eighteen-year association was given the last rites. The Camelot episode, coming immediately before his failed drugs test, snapped the tendon with Godolphin.

 

Dettori’s avowed intention is to retire at the ‘world championships’, the Breeders’ Cup where he has had a remarkable 29 successes and accumulating over $25m in prize money.  Lester Piggott, the one jockey to be mentioned in the same breath as Dettori as someone a wider constituency than racing folk can appreciate, retired at 50 and came back (to famous victory at the Breeders’ Cup) five years later. Frank Sinatra first retired at 56 – not once but several times. Sinatra’s signature tune was ‘My Way’ – the only way Dettori knows.

So let’s wait and see shall we, how ‘long gone’ Dettori’s retirement lasts. Everyone will clamour to give him his final ride and with his classic timing he will target the right one. But if the ‘right one’ turns out to be a two-year-old who goes into next year’s winter quarters as 2024 Derby favourite – well (with apologies to Oscar Wilde) the only thing Dettori can’t resist is temptation.

 

The gods couldn’t ‘retire’ him – the plane crash survival was miraculous and his injuries were less serious than those in falls on the racetrack that are the unavoidable consequence of the wear and tear on all horsemen. And as age catches up on any athlete the gaps get narrower and responses slower.

 

2022 might have been seen as an Indian Summer.  After disaster on John Gosden’s Stradivarius, only third in his bid to emulate Yeats as a four-time Ascot Gold Cup winner, Dettori returned to scales with a face that made Lester Piggott’s (said to be like a well-kept grave) look joyous. He rebounded with the stable’s Inspiral in the Group One Coronation Stakes.

 

The partnership with Gosden assisted the Newmarket trainer to five championships. But the good years didn’t save Dettori from what Gosden called a “sabbatical” (more brutally, and honestly, called ‘the sack’). For Stradivarius’s defeat. Gosden may have been thinking of Dettori’s eleven Group One wins on the dual Prix de l’Arc winner Enable when he gave his verdict on Dettori’s performance “Our hero overcomplicated it”.

 

Frankie’s watchword in the saddle, which he hasn’t always adhered to in life, is “don’t over complicate”. But as already intimated, the ageing athlete has to finesse actions which in youth were automatic, second nature. In youth genius will find a way: later, fading powers have to be compensated by drawing on the bank of experience. “My little secret is to try to have a positive outlook in life so when I get on a horse he feels that and performs better,” said Frankie. You can drive a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Perhaps it was Stradivarius who had supped his fill. He is now retired. Dettori insists his is nigh.

 

Frankie Dettori is one of the privileged few who have experienced life doing it ‘their way’. The most telling part of his retirement speech were the words, “I don’t want to be left on the bench.” The devoted Arsenal FC fan has just seen one of football’s former shining lights, Ronaldo icon of Portuguese soccer, spend much of the World Cup sat out – on the bench, a mere substitute.  

There’s no flying dismount from the bench. Nor does Dettori express any wish to become a ‘boutique jockey’ wrapped in cotton wool and wheeled out for the big days when, to use a lazy phrase he would still be ‘box office’. He has long since left behind riding at moribund Wolverhampton or Kempton on cold stormy nights - but the point should not be overlooked that when he’d mooted retirement five years ago it was a façade to allow Enable to take the limelight.

 

The fabled mare was twice a contributor to Dettori’s record six wins in the middle distance championship – the Arc. The bond with Enable and her ten Group Ones enveloped the racing public. Along with Gosden and Dettori there were ‘three people in this marriage’ – but on this occasion it worked.

 

He had fourteen rides in the Derby – including defeat on Dubai Millennium - before Authorized came along in 2007: eight years after there was another, Golden Horn: all three were favourites. When it came to public betting on the Derby there wasn’t quite the same fanatical following for Dettori as for Piggott (nine wins); still, latterly, the odds for his rides have reflected loyalty to their hero rather than the horse’s realistic chances.

 

28 Sep 1996 – Champions Day not at some run of the mill Saturday event but at the country’s premier course, Ascot: the BBC’s flagship TV sports programme Grandstand switched, a manoeuvre without precedent, to the course so as not to miss history being made. 25,095-1 were the odds bookies paid out on Dettori’s seven-timer but the true price should have been 235,834-1: hedging bookmakers had to react – what was happening out on the track was beyond their ken or control.

 

That culminating winner, Fujiyama Crest started at ridiculously short odds for a horse that hadn’t won for over a year because bookmakers for once changed roles and ‘bet like men’: they decided that the horse couldn’t possibly win. As the ‘impossible’ happened one distressed bookmaker pinned a surrender note on his board: “Come back Lester, all is forgiven.”

 

Dettori was asked by Ascot’s authorities not to whip up potentially uncontrollable fervour with a flying dismount (he’d been fined in the early days for doing it). But that Ascot day anything was possible and he sprayed an already intoxicated audience with champagne.

 

When Fujiyama Crest retired Dettori gave him a happy home: nice touch. The great question now – has ‘the people’s jockey’ a successor? They said there’d never be another Lester, known instantly by his first name. So there won’t. But just as assertively you can say there’ll never be another Frankie.