The Writers Guild of America is still on strike, so someone in Hollywood must be moonlighting to come up with Frankie Dettori’s scripts. The credits may, or may not, have rolled on his British career at Ascot on Saturday (spoiler alert: it is 1-8 with the bookies that he will be back at some point next year) but he could ride for another 30 years and never come up with a more satisfying or memorable conclusion to the story of his working life.
Dettori was simply brilliant on his two winners on Champions Day. King Of Steel’s run past all seven of his opponents in the Champion Stakes is the one that will get endless replays, the final reel that will remain embedded in the memories of the 30,000 spectators who roared him home. Trawlerman’s success in the opening race, though, was just as impressive in its way, as Dettori refused to be drawn into a duel with the runaway leader, judged his own travelling speed to the millisecond while clear of the rest of the field in second, and so had enough left in the tank to get back up in the final strides after Kyprios, the favourite, seemed to have his measure.
The self-confidence, judgment, horsemanship, instinct and timing that marked Dettori out as something special from his earliest days in the saddle were all to the fore in those two rides. A “look-ahead” newspaper feature in the late 1980s, picking out the then teenager as a face to follow, began with the simple line: “Horses run for Frankie Dettori.” It remains as true in 2023 as it was more than 30 years ago.
Dettori was blessed with abundant talent as a jockey thanks to his father, Gianfranco, a Classic-winning rider for Henry Cecil in Britain and multiple champion jockey in Italy. His natural ability, though, needed to be honed, and it was Dettori Sr who took the decision to pack young Frankie off to Newmarket as a 14-year-old – like a refugee from the blitz, with a label around his neck – to work as a stable lad and apprentice at Luca Cumani’s stable, one of the most powerful in the country at the time.
It was tough love, to say the least, on Gianfranco’s part, and a formative time for his son, whose desire to live up to his father’s expectations has seemingly been a major driver of his career ever since. Dettori, though, survived, and soon afterwards thrived, becoming the first teenager since Lester Piggott to ride 100 winners in a season in 1990.
The first significant bump in the road arrived in 1993, when Dettori was cautioned after a small amount of cocaine was found in his car, but another constant thread in his career has been an uncanny ability to roll with the punches and emerge from the troughs to scale fresh peaks.
When news of his caution reached the papers, the Hong Kong Jockey Club cancelled its offer of a lucrative riding contract later in the year. Had Dettori moved east, it is unlikely that he would have claimed the jockeys’ championship for the first time in 1994, or been in the right place at the right time when Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum of Dubai needed a popular, media-friendly jockey to be the public face of his nascent Godolphin operation.
The association with Godolphin’s royal blue silks underpinned the next two decades of his career and many of his greatest days, including four of the winners on the astonishing afternoon at Ascot in 1996 when he took all seven races on the card. The prospect of returning to ride horses such as Fantastic Light and Sakhee also offered hope for the future as he recovered from the devastating light-aircraft crash in 2000 which his pilot, Patrick Mackey, did not survive.
Exeter 2.00 Weaver’s Answer 2.30 Stroll On By 3.00 Snipe (nb) 3.30 Big Fish 4.00 Itso Fury 4.30 Petticoat Lucy 5.05 Dodger Long
Hereford 2.10 Favour And Fortune 2.40 Billytherealbigred 3.10 Young Wolf 3.40 Montregard 4.10 Kestrel Valley 4.40 Gerard Mentor (nap) 5.15 Chevington
Yarmouth 2.23 Climate Action 2.53 Lou Lou’s Gift 3.23 Churchill Rose 3.53 Kamanika 4.20 Lady Ava 4.53 Willingly 5.25 Ratafia
Wolverhampton 4.25 Tyke 5.00 Keep My Secret 5.30 Lynwood Lad 6.00 Flavius Titus 6.30 Age Of Time 7.00 Intervention 7.30 Lady Bouquet 8.00 Stay Smart 8.30 Master Of Combat
Sheikh Mohammed also allowed Dettori to get off the ride on a Godolphin-trained outsider to ride Authorized to a long-awaited first Derby success in 2007. But when the relationship with Godolphin ruptured and Dettori was banned for six months in late 2012 for testing positive for cocaine while riding in France, there seemed to be no way back.
Of course, in true Hollywood style, there was, and the final decade of Dettori’s riding career has arguably been the best of all. Another Derby, three Arcs and winners at the Breeders’ Cup have been the obvious highlights, but he also pushed the bookmaking industry to the edge of the abyss in June 2019 when he rode the first four winners on Gold Cup day at Ascot.
And throughout the long and giddy ride, he has fed on the adulation from the grandstands to carry him from one victory to the next. Horse races are, in theory, discrete and independent events but when Dettori gets on a roll and the fans are behind him, the sense of momentum, that one win makes the next more likely, is impossible to ignore.
As he conceded on Saturday, it is a fuel that Dettori will miss when he moves to the United States full time from December. “I can’t take it to America with me,” he said. “I’m fairly new over there.” And it remains to be seen how long the Californian sunshine will maintain its allure if big-race rides and winners prove elusive.
Getting onto a horse with a chance in the Kentucky Derby in May – the most ambitious target for his Californian swansong – is a long shot, but then so was his 39-1 double on Saturday. The sequel, they say, is never as good as the original. When Frankie Dettori is playing the lead, however, you can never be entirely sure.
