John Ingles on how Frankie Dettori has bounced back from a number of different challenges in his lengthy riding career.
The sabbatical of 2022
For a short while in the summer of 2022 Frankie Dettori's association with John and Thady Gosden's stable was put on hold during a much publicised 'sabbatical' but Dettori, who turned 52 earlier this month, has bounced back from much greater challenges than that in his lengthy career.
For one thing, that wasn't the first time in Dettori’s career that his relationship with his retained stable has taken a turn for the worse. Having become champion apprentice when starting out in Newmarket under Luca Cumani, the young jockey had ambitions to further his career in Hong Kong. Cumani, who’d taken on Dettori as an unruly teenager, evidently wasn’t happy at losing his talented young jockey and there was nothing ‘amicable’ - the word Gosden used to describe their brief split last summer – about Dettori’s departure. But relations between Cumani and Dettori were mended fairly quickly as proven by Barathea winning the 1994 Breeders’ Cup Mile for the old partnership.
Lacking direction, Dettori’s future was initially uncertain after leaving Cumani, especially after any hopes of fulfilling his ambitions in Hong Kong were ended by receiving a police caution for being in possession of a class A drug. But with the help of mentor Barney Curley, Dettori’s career got back on track when he joined John Gosden, taking up the position of retained rider to Sheikh Mohammed. Dettori’s first two jockeys’ championships, in 1994 and 1995, soon followed and in 1996 he was in the right place at the right time to be appointed stable jockey to the fledgling Godolphin operation.
Godolphin's greatest?
Dettori enjoyed plenty of success internationally in the early years of Godolphin, though his handling of Swain in the closing stages of the 1998 Breeders’ Cup Classic drew plenty of justified criticism, with the American media being particularly scathing. Little wonder then, that Dettori felt a sense of redemption when riding Daylami to a nine-length victory in the Turf at the same meeting 12 months later.
‘I felt like my ten-year career had been almost ruined in a two-minute race’ said Dettori in a Daily Telegraph interview reflecting on Swain’s third place at Churchill Downs.
But it wasn’t very long afterwards that Dettori had a life-changing experience which must have put the outcome of a horse race into a very different perspective.
Dettori miraculously escaped with not much more than a broken ankle when the light aircraft he was travelling in crashed soon after take-off at Newmarket in June 2000. Pulled from the wreckage by the other passenger, fellow jockey Ray Cochrane, Dettori was riding winners again just a couple of months later, but while he quickly recovered from the injuries sustained in an accident that he was lucky to survive – it claimed the life of pilot Patrick Mackey – the trauma of the incident is still something Dettori is living with over 20 years later as he admitted in his recent autobiography Leap of Faith.
Major distractions out of the saddle
Dettori’s annual tally of winners dropped below a hundred in the years immediately following his accident, partly through choosing to be more selective about his rides. But after what Dettori referred to as ‘a crap summer’ in 2003, he finished the season with a flourish to reach the century again with a score of 101.
Relinquishing his role as a team captain on BBC’s A Question of Sport (a fellow contestant innocently asking him how long he had been retired gave him much food for thought), Dettori focused on another push for the jockeys’ title in 2004 and was rewarded by beating the reigning champion Kieren Fallon after a close battle. That was despite the handicap of travelling to race meetings mainly by road, occasionally by helicopter, but never again in a light aircraft.
It was ironic that Dettori’s third championship was aided by a large increase in the size of the Godolphin string because the growth of the ever-expanding operation was ultimately to be the catalyst for the next big challenge in Dettori’s career. In 2012, Godolphin recruited up-and-coming younger jockeys Mickael Barzalona and Silvestre de Sousa to share the workload with Dettori who in theory remained Godolphin’s main jockey but was now increasingly questioning his status in an operation which had also taken on a second private trainer, Mahmood Al Zarooni, in addition to Saeed Bin Suroor.
A failure to secure rides in the Derby and Oaks (Barzalona’s partnership with the Al Zarooni-trained Encke was maintained successfully in the St Leger) did nothing to make Dettori feel any less marginalised so he jumped at the chance when rivals Coolmore offered him the ride on Camelot in the Arc.
That essentially made his position with his employers untenable and Dettori’s 18-year association with Godolphin ended that season, his statement concluding that ‘my position in the stable has changed a little bit and I need a new challenge.’
Lengthy ban and a fresh start
However, Dettori’s ‘new challenge’ was made all the harder when it turned out he had failed a drugs test when riding on Arc Trials day at Longchamp. The resulting six-month ban kept him out of action until June of the following year but he was soon in a new job, appointed stable jockey for Al Shaqab Racing belonging to Sheikh Joaan Al Thani of Qatar.
The Sheikh’s acquisition of top French filly Treve appeared to give Dettori an exciting mount in his new role. The partnership got off to a successful start in the Prix Vermeille but a broken ankle sustained when unseated in the paddock just days before the Arc resulted in Dettori missing the big race.
By the time Treve lined up for the following year’s Arc (which she again won), Dettori had lost the ride on her for good after odds-on defeats in her first two starts that season.
Old alliance reformed
And so to Dettori’s latest ‘bounce back’, a spectacular revival late in his career thanks to rejoining John Gosden whose stable’s strength has almost certainly never been greater than in the years since Dettori’s second spell with the trainer.
Replacing William Buick after the latter’s move to Godolphin, Dettori’s first season at Clarehaven in 2015 coincided with Golden Horn’s outstanding three-year-old campaign, while long and successful partnerships since with the likes of Enable and Stradivarius have also been a feature of the latter years of Dettori’s career.
It was Dettori’s ride on Stradivarius in the latest Gold Cup which contributed to what proved to be only a brief split between trainer and jockey, but the long-term relationship between Gosden – ‘a great human being’ the jockey says in his autobiography – and Dettori was surely never seriously under threat.
‘He knows when to give me a kick up the arse and when to put his arm round my shoulder…Sometimes I feel he knows me better than I know myself. When people use the word ‘trainer’, they mean someone who trains horses, but John trains me too half the time.’
