Frankie Dettori: Best horses through the decades
John Ingles looks at the most significant horses from each decade of Frankie Dettori's riding career.
TEENS – MARKOFDISTINCTION (Peak Timeform rating: 130)
Frankie Dettori rode his first winner in Britain as a 16-year-old apprentice on Lizzy Hare at Goodwood in 1987 for Luca Cumani. Three years later, he became the first teenager since Lester Piggott to ride 100 winners in a season when his 140 winners placed him fourth in the jockeys’ championship behind Pat Eddery, Willie Carson and Steve Cauthen.
Cumani was runner-up to Henry Cecil in the trainers’ championship that season, and the stable’s best horse, the top-class four-year-old miler Markofdistinction, provided the young Dettori with some early milestones in his riding career. Having already won the Trusthouse Forte Mile together at Sandown in the spring, Markofdistinction came from last place to win the Queen Anne Stakes, becoming Dettori’s first Royal Ascot winner.
That was only a Group 2 contest at the time, but Dettori won his first Group 1 on the same horse back at Ascot that autumn in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes when they got the better of the Eddery-ridden Distant Relative by a length after a tremendous duel over the last furlong and a half. Later on the same card, Cumani and Dettori won another Group 1, the Fillies’ Mile, with Shamshir whose owner Sheikh Mohammed was to have a huge influence in the direction Dettori’s career was to take in the next couple of decades.
TWENTIES – DUBAI MILLENNIUM (140)
Sheikh Mohammed’s creation of Godolphin in 1994, with Dettori appointed as the operation’s retained jockey, resulted in Dettori partnering a string of top-class horses that included Balanchine, Daylami, Swain and Lammtarra. However, it was the colt Dettori partnered to make a winning debut in a Yarmouth maiden in October 1998 who was to eclipse those stars and all those who have raced in the royal blue ever since.
Dubai Millennium was trained by David Loder for that sole two-year-old start before joining the main Godolphin string under Saeed bin Suroor at three, a season which he ended as a top-class miler with Group 1 wins in the Prix Jacques le Marois and Queen Elizabeth II Stakes. But it was as a four-year-old that Dubai Millennium established himself as one of the best horses in Timeform’s experience and the best Dettori is ever likely to ride.
Dubai Millennium had already broken the track record on his dirt debut at Nad Al Sheba in his prep race, and then did so again in spectacular style in the Dubai World Cup itself when making virtually all the running to beat the top-class American horse Behrens by six lengths. Dettori partnered Dubai Millennium in all his races bar his final start (when successful under Jerry Bailey in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes) when he was recovering from injuries sustained when the light aircraft he was travelling in crashed on take-off at Newmarket weeks earlier.
THIRTIES – AUTHORIZED (133)
For all the worldwide success that his association with Godolphin had brought him, and despite three jockeys’ championships to his name, Dettori was well into his 30s but had still not won British racing’s most famous Flat race, the Derby, having won all the other domestic classics. Not even Dubai Millennium had been able to put that right, suffering the only defeat of his career at Epsom.
Dubai Millennium was one of Dettori’s 14 losing rides in the race before the Peter Chapple-Hyam-trained colt Authorized finally provided him with that belated first winner in 2007. The partnership got off to the best possible start when Authorized won the Racing Post Trophy as a once-raced maiden at odds of 25/1, making him one of the ante-post Derby favourites.
An emphatic win in the Dante at York ensured Authorized was sent off the 5/4 favourite at Epsom, with Godolphin releasing Dettori to allow him to keep the ride on him on the Derby. Authorized enjoyed a smooth run and scored by five lengths, but before returning to a tumultuous reception – and the trademark flying dismount – in the winner’s circle Dettori broke with tradition by first parading Authorized in front of the stands.
Dettori rode Authorized in his three remaining races and they were successful again in a vintage edition of the Juddmonte International at York when beating the King George winner Dylan Thomas, with Notnowcato, who had beaten Authorized in the Eclipse, back in third.
FORTIES – ENABLE (134)
By the time Dettori won his second Derby eight years later with Golden Horn his association with Godolphin was over, but 2015 sealed a renewed partnership instead with that colt’s trainer John Gosden with whom Dettori had had a retainer in the mid-1990s.
The Derby was just the first in a series of big-race wins that year for Dettori and Golden Horn, who also won the Eclipse, Irish Champion Stakes and Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. Golden Horn made 2015 a season to remember for Dettori, but his resurgence as a big-race jockey in recent years with Gosden, after some much leaner seasons, was made complete by the partnership he established with the best filly or mare of his entire riding career, Enable. Their 11 Group 1 victories together, which included an unprecedented third King George for Enable in July, as well as two Arcs (taking Dettori to a record six wins in the race), were spread over four seasons, a much longer period than most Flat jockeys get to enjoy with a top-class horse, and the bond Dettori established with Enable over that time was clearly a very special one to him.
Enable contributed to Dettori’s total of 19 Group 1 wins in 2019 when her essay in Racehorses paid this tribute to her jockey. ‘There has been no other active participant in Flat racing in Britain in the last quarter of a century with anything like the level of general public recognition and appeal, and…racing owes him a huge debt of gratitude, not just for his virtuoso performances in the saddle but for his role in promoting racing’s appeal.’
FIFTIES - PALACE PIER (129)
Palace Pier showed his best form as a three-year-old in the 2020 campaign - before Dettori celebrated his 50th birthday on December 17 of that year - but he still provided his rider with three Group 1s in 2021.
Palace Pier failed to match the peak Timeform rating of 132 that he earned in 2020, but he still showed high-class form to win the Lockinge Stakes, Queen Anne and a second Prix Jacques le Marois.
Only the mighty Baaeed - who is Timeform's highest-rated turf horse since Frankel - could stop Palace Pier signing off with a win in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes.
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