8 hours ago
2
It has been a giddy, glorious and occasionally bumpy ride, but this time, it seems, Frankie Dettori’s mind is made up. The most storied jockey of the last 40 years will effectively head into retirement after the main card at the Breeders’ Cup at Del Mar on Saturday, when he will have three chances to add a farewell Grade One winner to nearly 300 on his record already. Racing may not see a career quite like it again.
Alongside Lester Piggott and perhaps John McCririck over the past half-century, “Frankie” registers with pretty much everyone, no surname required. People know who he is, even if they have no interest at all in what he does. In a world that has been fragmented by social media and the internet, Dettori may well be the last racing figure who will ever enjoy such instant name-recognition across a broad swathe of the British population.
Dettori’s lifetime in the sport, after all, dates back to an era when A Question Of Sport regularly pulled in more than 10 million viewers, and a three-year stint as a team captain was more than enough to establish him as the bubbly, irrepressible face of racing. His last year on the show was 2004, which was also the year when he won the Flat jockeys’ title for the third and final time. As far as much of the British public is concerned, however, he has probably been the champion in most years since.
It is, in many respects, a hard-won celebrity, a double-edged reward for events both on and off the track that have repeatedly pushed Dettori onto the front pages, ever since the unforgettable afternoon at Ascot in 1996 when he defied odds of 25,000-1 to ride all seven winners on the card.
In June 2000, he was pulled from the burning wreckage of a light aircraft by his fellow rider, Ray Cochrane, after a crash on takeoff in which the plane’s pilot was killed. When he finally ended his quest for a Derby winner in 2007, that too was headline news.
And if everyone loves a winner, they often love a flawed hero and a comeback even more. A six-month ban after a failed drug test for cocaine would have been the end of most jockeys in their 40s, more than enough time for owners and trainers to find a younger alternative. For Dettori, though, suspension in December 2012 was a bridge to a renewed association with John Gosden in Newmarket, and a fresh succession of champions and Classic winners, including Enable, Golden Horn and Stradivarius.
The public highs and lows have been an essential part of Dettori’s story, up to and including the humiliating admission in March that he was filing for bankruptcy after a prolonged dispute with HMRC over unpaid taxes, a situation that Dettori tried, and failed, to keep private.
There have been so many twists to the tale, in fact, that it can be easy to forget that without Dettori’s immense, generational talent, there would be no story at all.
It was clear from his earliest days as a teenage apprentice that there was an instinctive rapport between horse and rider whenever Dettori was in the saddle.
Horses ran for him, and improved for him. In 1990, he was the first teenager since Piggott to reach 100 winners in a season, and also announced his arrival at the highest level with a Group One double at Ascot, on the same card that he would charge through unbeaten just six years later. The famous flying dismount, copied from the American legend Angel Cordero Jr, was added to Dettori’s repertoire in 1994, and the buzz from riding a big-race winner has never left him. Nor has the gift of knowing, with something akin to clairvoyance, where to sit, when to strike and where the gaps will appear.
But what now for the public face of British racing? It will not be easy to finally let go, whether or not Dettori fulfils his apparent desire to take “a few rides in South America, which is something I’ve always wanted to do”. It is not, after all, an ambition that he has mentioned until now.
But the calamitous decision to accept the tax advice that led to his dispute with HMRC means that Dettori will not draw down the curtain on his career with enough money in the bank to kick back and take things easy.
He has already been confirmed in a new role as a “global ambassador” with the football super-agent Kia Joorabchian’s burgeoning Amo Racing operation. Dettori told Matt Chapman on At The Races on Friday this was the main reason for his departure now, as well as being able to finish at the Breeders’ Cup. “These opportunities don’t come along very often. I like the set-up – this is a young team with big ambitions,” explained the jockey.
Joorabchian, himself, was gushing in his praise for his new recruit at Del Mar on Thursday. “He’s an icon, he is a true legend of the sport,” Joorabchian said. “When you talk about great sportsmen like LeBron James, Currys, Messis and Pelés and people like that, Frankie is that to horse racing. When you go into Royal Ascot, you see a statue there, you know that he’s made a big impact on so many lives across the world.
“He’s not here to entertain people, he’s here to actually work and he will be working with us very closely. He will be involved in all aspects of our business [but] he won’t be a racing manager. He is a global ambassador.”
Reality TV is another possibility, although earlier outings on Celebrity Big Brother and I’m A Celebrity … have tended to reveal a moodier side to Dettori’s character, behind the ebullient public persona. On both shows, he was an early casualty of the public vote.
It may be that Dettori himself does not really know what he will do and how he will fill his time once his race-riding days are over. And for another 24 hours at least, he remains a top-level professional jockey, focused on three rides at one of the most prestigious and glamorous events in the calendar.
A five-year-old filly called Argine will be Dettori’s final Grade One mount in the Breeders’ Cup Mile, the same race in which he registered his first Breeders’ Cup success in 1994. Her form at home in Japan suggests that she has something to find to figure, but few riders in history have ever risen to an occasion like Lanfranco Dettori.
For one final time, cue Frankie?
