Frankie Dettori took to the DJ decks at Newmarket

Frankie Dettori career reflections following decision to scrap retirement and race on in America

By Graham Cunningham

09:28 · TUE October 17, 2023

Racing’s Rocket Man is still circling the globe but his timeless flight has met turbulence of late.

You could tell from his unusually sheepish manner during Thursday morning’s media round that Frankie knew his retirement reversal would trigger a response. And boy, were some Twitter folks triggered.

Ace news breaker Nick Luck caught a stray bullet amid the golden glow of his latest Dettori scoop as an enraged David John Martin boomed that “the sycophantic press are the enabler and I am finding his manipulation of the situation repugnant."

The two colleagues who were 11/10 joint favourites to re-post barbed comments (yes, I'm looking at you Neil Callan and Zac Purton) were out of the gates before you could say 'green eyed monster'.

And even ultra-measured media grand duke Paul Hayward, who started scribbling in the same year Frankie rode his first British winner in 1987, allowed his frustration to surface by saying "may this be the death of the ‘farewell tour’ in sport."

Are the acid drops understandable? Well, those who insist Frankie ‘makes it all about himself’ have a point and his grand goodbye, with stop-offs in Bahrain, Saudi, Dubai, Italy, America, France, Ireland, Sweden and Hungary, has felt too much like a cash grab for some.

But you get a free pass for far more serious offences from the bulk of the crowd when you happen to be the man who has done more to make your sport echo beyond its own strange bubble than anyone in history.

Make no mistake, reverse ferret frustrations will abate as Frankie returns to his beloved Ascot on Saturday. And as with Sir Elton’s final British fling at Glastonbury this summer, there is zero doubt as to who will top the bill on the QIPCO Champions Day main stage.

Shamshir success helped light the spark

My hair was as black as Dettori’s is now when Shamshir gave the wunderkind one of his first big Ascot successes aboard a chestnut filly owned by Sheikh Mohammed and trained by Luca Cumani on the last Saturday of September in 1990.

I’d been let loose on a few essays for Timeform’s ‘Racehorses’ annuals – that year’s cover featured Bill O’Gorman's rugged juvenile Timeless Times for winning 16 races by early September – and the piece on Fillies’ Mile winner Shamshir contained several nuggets of interest.

Dettori had become the first teenager to ride a hundred winners in a British season since Lester Piggott in 1955, while Cumani’s memorable campaign had a sting in the tail when the Aga Khan severed his connection with British racing over medication issues.

A suggestion that Shamshir might develop into a leading Oaks contender – only thwarted by Jim Bolger pulling a 50/1 rabbit from the hat with Jet Ski Lady – managed to make the final cut in a book that still sits on the shelf in my office.

Any notion that Shamshir’s rider would still be riding G1 winners fully 33 years later would have been laughed out of that hard-nosed Halifax court but it was clear long before cellphones took over our lives that we were dealing with a rare one.

From Hammy to HK and all points in between

Frankie Dettori bids 'farewell' to Royal Ascot earlier this year

My first memory of a pre-digital Dettori is of a cheeky teenager breezing into the Hamilton Press room to commandeer a landline for animated post-race chats in Italian with Luca before sprinting off with a cackling “did you get all that, lads?"

The playful kid had become a multiple champ with a harder, brooding edge by the time I chased him around Haydock Park seeking his response to a six-day ban (for putting a youthful Fran Berry on the deck) that ruled him out of Royal Ascot at York in 2005.

But my most vivid personal Frankie memory stems from the first day of June in 2000, when a plane crash on Newmarket Heath left Dettori and Ray Cochrane with serious injuries.

Feelings ran high on the Racing Post newsdesk that day and I’ll never forget hearing former champion Joe Mercer’s plaintive voice saying “please don’t say the pilot was Patrick” when I called to ask about a similar incident he was involved in before Brigadier Gerard’s run in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes of 1972.

Sadly, it was. Patrick Mackey died aged 52 that day but Dettori knew full well that it could easily have been him as he limped into Ascot to see Dubai Millennium dismantle his Prince of Wales’s rivals under replacement rider Jerry Bailey three weeks later.

The fact that Dettori’s story hadn’t even reached halfway at the time of that crash tells a tale of his astounding longevity and most of my subsequent brief encounters with him have come amid far happier events.

Bantering with tipsy punters in the Easyjet queue after Marienbard’s Arc; morphing from grumpy old dad to smiling TV charmer in the time it took Lucky or Rishi to say “welcome to the Morning Line” in a chilly Rowley Mile studio; or saying “anything for you, mate” when I thanked him for giving a gaggle of giddy Chinese media the deluxe Frankie experience after a swank World’s Best Jockey ceremony at the Hong Kong Convention Centre in 2019.

There is something uncanny about the energy that celebrities can radiate when the lights are brightest but that frisson can only truly crackle if the performer in question has a singular career to back it up.

Raven’s the key to California dreaming

Arnold Schwarzenegger and jockey Frankie Dettori, rider of Raven's Pass

And Frankie’s body of work beggars belief.

I’ve been lucky enough to see him work his magic at some of the world’s greatest racecourses over the years - but how do you narrow the field after the thick end of 4,000 winners including almost 300 at G1 level?

Doubtless you will have your own personal favourites but my prime candidates for any list of Dettori’s Mount Rushmore moments involve:

Welding himself to the neck of an equine powder keg before lighting the fuse on Lochsong’s explosive speed at Ascot, York and Longchamp. They were a match made in sprinting heaven.
Forcing Rewilding ahead of So You Think in a thunderous Prince of Wales’s then watching John McCririck laud the ride on ATR before performing his own rapid reverse ferret once stewards hit him with a nine-day whip ban
Floating across from so-called coffin box draws to win the fourth of his six Arcs on Golden Horn and repeating the feat in a Cesarewitch and two Ebors on Never Can Tell, Trawlerman and Absurde.
Blending force and finesse to perfection as Ouija Board nailed Alexander Goldrun in the Nassau. “You will not see a better race at Goodwood, ever,” said BBC caller Jim McGrath. He was dead right.
Precision paint scraping as Fantastic Light ended Galileo’s unbeaten streak in the Irish Champion. The winning margin was just a head – and Mick Kinane still rues the day he was outpointed on his own patch.
And saluting a sun-kissed Santa Anita Press box filled with grizzled American scribes doing hasty re-writes and raucous British media members celebrating a Pick Six heist after Raven's Pass floored Curlin’s bid for back-to-back BC Classics.

Low notes of DJ Dettori

California will call again soon enough but no arrivederci Frankie piece would be complete without a reflection on the times when he has played villain rather than hero. And the rap sheet, surprisingly short given the length of his career, includes:

A frenetic left-hand drive that hindered Swain in the Classic – though it was 25 years ago.
That 2012 cocaine ban - huge at the time and the final straw for a crumbling relationship.
Divorce from Godolphin – and lean times that followed.
Premature jock elation on Lady Aurelia in the Nunthorpe – it’s happened to the best.
A couple of contentious spins on old friend Strad – leading to a short-lived Gosden ‘sabbatical.’
A petulant Champs Day spray at Dylan Browne McMonagle – not a good look, Lanfranco.
And one of the blandest soundtracks ever heard on Desert Island Discs?
Now some things you simply can’t forgive – and there can be no excuse for inflicting Keating, Hucknall, Robbie Williams (and the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards!) on the great British public.

Sun going down on an epic journey

Frankie pictured with wife, Catherine

Joking apart, Dettori’s departure will resonate particularly strongly for those of a certain age, first because he has been a constant in our sporting lives but also because his exit provides a stark reminder that we are all moving ever closer to the final peg in our own personal weighing rooms.

Hall of Famers Steve Cauthen and the late Pat Eddery were battling for the jockeys’ championship when Dettori rode his first British winner on Lizzy Hare at Goodwood in June, 1987.

Eddery, Fallon, Darley, Spencer, Sanders, Moore, Hanagan, Hughes, De Sousa, Crowley, Murphy and Buick have all worn the crown since Frankie won the first of his three championships in 1994, while Kinane, Murtagh, Smullen, Peslier and Soumillon have tested him on the biggest stages all over Europe and beyond.

But none of those exceptional riders will leave a legacy to match the man who, like Lester, Tiger, Serena and a select few others, can be recognised the world over by just his Christian name.

Recent dramas suggest it’s best not to predict Frankie’s future, though I’m prepared to speculate that tickets for a Grosvenor House Hotel Celebration Dinner at £1,250 a pop (or a snip at £10,000 for a table for ten) might not be selling like Marco Pierre White hot cakes after Thursday’s news.

Perhaps the final curtain will fall in spring at Santa Anita or maybe in a British summer without the brouhaha of this year’s circus, but at some point Frankie Dettori will work the crowd, throw his hands skyward and prime his ageing knees for one last flying dismount.

He says it could be three months or three years before the sun goes down on his American adventure. But racing’s remarkable Rocket Man will have to come back down to earth eventually. And, to borrow one last Elton line, I think it’s gonna be a long, long time before we see another remotely like him.

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