“There will be tears,” Frankie Dettori exclaims softly as, with tangled emotions, he looks towards his last day of racing in Britain on Saturday. “It’s going to be difficult, because it’s my last goodbye, really, and I will shed tears of sadness and happiness.
“I know it will be the last time I’ll be walking to the jockeys’ room at Ascot, which is my favourite track, and I’ll walk out with amazing memories. It won’t be easy to separate the emotions and the riding.”
In a discreet corner of a London hotel, Dettori is quieter than usual. He still erupts into uproarious laughter every now and then but the weight of an ending brings a curious stillness to him. A genius of a jockey and an ebullient showman who dragged racing into the limelight with his brilliance and his flaws, Dettori is about to take a different path.
He gazes at the River Thames, which looks sombre beneath a dreary sky. Even at 52, the jockey, who is as strapping as he is tiny, remains a more eye-catching sight. He has spent the past three hours whipping through a familiar routine. Whether doing flying dismounts on to cushions for the cameras, talking to a huddle of reporters on the South Bank or appearing on television to announce a sudden switch in his retirement plans, Dettori has been as amusing and confident as ever. But there is sadness, too, that this part of his life is almost over.
After racing on Saturday, where the 5ft 4in Italian will again be the dominant figure at the Qipco British Champions Day at Ascot, he says he will not ride in Britain again. Dettori was supposed to retire next month but, earlier in the day, he confirmed rumours that have swirled around for weeks. He will spend the next few years riding in America and at major races in Japan, Australia and the Middle East.
The bookmakers expect he will be back for Royal Ascot next year though, with the odds on this happening a prohibitive 8‑1 on, but Dettori tells me his racing days in Britain are over. After his remarkable 287 Group One race winners, as well as the humiliating exposés and bans, there is now such an outpouring of affection for the most significant character in racing over the past 30 years that Dettori has struggled to control himself. “I came close a couple of times to cracking,” he says, “but I’ve been quite good so far. It was probably hardest at York and Deauville.”
He was also in Milan on Sunday, racing one last time at the track where “it all started for me”, he says: “I would go racing in Milan to watch my dad as a kid, play soccer with the other jockeys’ sons in the park, watching races in between. I would have my 50p on a tricast [bet] and, as an eight‑year‑old boy, I couldn’t even reach the tote to put it on. So to have my last day there with my mum and dad, my real mum, my sister, my cousins, my school friends and all the trainers is pretty emotional.”
His sister has said that their father, Gianfranco, who was champion jockey 13 times in Italy, has put Frankie under pressure for 50 years. She also suggested that Dettori, who has been wounded often by his dad, is addicted to phoning him for the inevitable reproach whether he wins or loses a big race. Dettori nods when I ask if his dad will put him under the usual pressure this week.
“Oh yeah. France Galop [French racing’s governing body] were very good. They surprised me by bringing him over for the Arc. I only saw him for five minutes and said: ‘Dad, I’ve got a plane to catch.’ But of course he was the first one to say when I got beat: ‘Oh, you were too far back.’ I said: ‘My God.’”
Dettori sounds exasperated – less by finishing well down the field on Free Wind than by his father. The fact that Frankie had won the Arc on six previous occasions did not seem to matter to Dettori Sr. Has he ever said well done? “My dad?” Dettori says. “Rare. It’s that rare, I can’t remember.”
Dettori bursts out laughing but I am not sure if it’s genuine mirth or a deflection of his real feelings. In all the sentimentality of his Ascot farewell could his dad finally congratulate him? “No chance,” Dettori says. “Dad is set in his ways. For years he hurt me but, now that I know his character, it doesn’t affect me in the slightest.
“My sister thinks I keep calling him because I like getting reprimanded. Not really. Every time I call my dad it’s because I know he’s the only one to give me an honest opinion. It’s more of a professional relationship, because if I do something wrong he’ll tell me the truth.”
Will the end of his racing in Britain feel like a second retirement for his father – who has lived so much through Frankie? “Yes,” Dettori says, before grinning. “Now we’ll keep him awake while he’s watching me in California. He’ll have to stay up until three in the morning, watching the last race.”
Gianfranco had not spoken to his daughter for 40 years until they were recently reconciled. Would his father have paid attention to Frankie if he had not been a successful jockey? “That’s the argument I have with my dad because we do a dangerous job. I say: ‘Dad, what about if I’d fallen and smashed my knee and couldn’t ride?’ My dad says: ‘Look at you now. You’re champion jockey. Your argument doesn’t stick.’”
Did that tough approach make Dettori a much better jockey? “Oh yes. But I couldn’t do that to my children. No chance.”
When was the moment Dettori and his dad found some kind of understanding? “Maybe after the plane crash,” he says. Dettori and the former jockey Ray Cochrane were fortunate after their light aircraft crashed on the way to Goodwood in 2000. Cochrane pulled Dettori from the burning wreckage but he could not save the pilot, Patrick Mackey.
“Before the crash we didn’t talk for three years. After that we thought: ‘Why are we arguing?’ He didn’t say he could have lost me but him coming over to see me made us think that.”
In 1985, his dad had made him leave Italy for England. Frankie was devastated when he arrived at Luton airport, unable to speak English and with a name tag hanging around his neck, as he prepared to work at Luca Cumani’s yard in Newmarket. He was 14. What advice would Dettori give to his younger self? “Brace yourself because this is going to be some rollercoaster.’ When I embarked on that plane I didn’t expect all this shit to happen.”
Dettori once told me that reflecting back on his early years in England was like looking at the desperate life of an asylum seeker. Does he still feel like a foreigner? “No, because England has changed. In the late 1980s my olive skin meant I was a black person to them. Now you get people from all over the world, Polish, Indian, Czechs. But when I arrived in Newmarket only a couple of guys were black. The rest were white as white so I got bullied a lot. It was mild bullying – the odd slap or dig but those bullies became my best friends.”
England fell in love with Dettori, especially when he won all seven races at Ascot in 1996, but the mood soured when he was handed a six-month suspension in 2012 after cocaine was found in his system in a drugs test in France. On his return, the phone hardly rang and he went 51 races without a winner. Suffering from bulimia and depression, Dettori was shocked out of his slump by his wife.
“Catherine was worried,” Dettori says as he explains how she reminded him that he usually swanned around telling everyone he was great. “It took six words from her to wake me up: ‘Show me how good you are.’ She said it when I needed a good kick up the arse. Coming from her it made all the difference.”
Will Catherine give him any reminders this week? “She might tell me to calm down,” Dettori cackles. “I don’t need geeing up this week for sure.”
They will soon leave for Los Angeles, sparking Frankie goes to Hollywood headlines, and Dettori will race at “Santa Anita, where they filmed Seabiscuit – it’s a beautiful track.”
Away from the showmanship, he is still deadly in the saddle. “When I said last December I was going to retire I expected things to slow down. But it completely went the other way. More winners, more success. Two months ago, I thought: ‘I’m not ready to stop.’ I had to think of something else to get [racing] out of my system.”
America is the solution. “I had four months there last year and really enjoyed it. I was second in the [jockey] standings. The weather is nice, you don’t have to travel and there’s a new challenge.”
Dettori’s thirst for big winners is unsated. His eyes gleam as he talks of his desire to win the Kentucky Derby. “In America, your agent is a big asset and I’ve got one of the best in Ron Anderson. He represented Jerry Bailey and Gary Stevens and he’s now got John Velazquez and Joel Rosario. He gets rides with all the top trainers, including Bob Baffert [with whom Dettori won the Dubai World Cup on Country Grammer last year]. Bob probably has the best chance of me getting the Kentucky Derby right.”
Earlier, when I asked if he would return for Royal Ascot next year, Dettori said: “I could ride in America for three months or three years. But I have no plan to return. Everybody keeps asking about Royal Ascot. It depends how it falls in the American calendar but at the moment I’m committed to staying in America.”
He is now more direct when I ask again if he will resume racing in Britain. “No, I won’t come back. I’ve achieved everything here. Come back to what? Everything’s changed. The old trainers I used to work for, they all retired. It’s new trainers, new jockeys. There’s nothing here for me to achieve. But America and the international scene is a new challenge.”
He has one last set of challenges in Britain on Saturday and he smiles when he names the horses, “the absolute weapons”, he could ride at Ascot – King of Steel, Kinross, Free Wind and Inspiral. “I’m not saying any is sure to win, but I have chances.
“I still have to balance two things and process the pressure of riding as well as the pressure of knowing it’s your last time. Luckily, I’m experienced – but I’m human too. If I’ve got a knot in my stomach and I feel a bit sick, it’s normal. I don’t expect anything different. I know the symptoms and I deal with it. I’m ready to go at Ascot – one last time.”
