Dettori on race to keep up with today’s jockeys as he approaches 50 (2023)

Frankie Dettori dances down a short flight of stairs in the Queen’s Stand at Epsom and darts to his right, past the weighing scales at the door. It is Monday afternoon and the racecourse is deserted but even though Dettori has to keep an appointment with the Queen in Newmarket later on he is keen to make a quick diversion before he leaves.

Dettori is looking dapper, as always, in a blue three-piece suit. He says he has an Italian friend who is a tailor in New York. He does all his suits. Without breaking his stride he lifts up the collar to reveal a set of letters on its inside. ‘Frankie’ it says in red capitals.

His brain whirs as he walks. He wonders whether it would be acceptable to hand the Queen a packet of Polo mints to feed Enable, the double Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe winner, at John Gosden’s yard when she arrives. No one knows the royal protocol for Polos.

Frankie marches down a short corridor past an oil painting by Isaac Cullin of a scene before the Derby of 1883. A steward wearing a top hat, a starched white shirt with a winged collar and a long grey beard is surveying a jockey as he weighs out sitting in a sling.

He strides on until he gets to the doors of the weighing room. He pushes them open, flicks on a light and sits down in his spot.

He looks around the empty room. The bench on which he sits is arranged in three sides of a rectangle around a big wooden table. Thin, round pieces of lead lie on its surface where they were discarded after the previous meeting. An open copy of the Racing Post is spread-eagled next to them.

Frankie sits still for a moment, leans back against the wall and gazes around the room.

He talks about the traditions of the weighing room. He points to the far side of the room and the peg where he got changed when he first started racing more than 30 years ago.

As he grew more experienced and other jockeys retired, his peg moved around the rectangle. More than a decade ago he found himself in the seat closest to the door, the next man out.

‘Sometimes I go racing now,’ he says, ‘and I only know three or four jockeys in the weighing room. All the others are so young. I’m sitting underneath the last peg, watching these kids, thinking: “S**t, this is it.” I’ve been next to that door since Pat Eddery retired 15 years ago. After that you’re out. I thought it would take me for ever to get to this peg but now I’m here, holding on for dear life.’

Dettori is 48 and as he sits surrounded by his memories he thinks about the fact that he is in the autumn of his career. He nods. ‘Twilight,’ he says. ‘It’s horrible. It’s funny because when I was young, I couldn’t wait to retire. I’d say I was going to retire at 40 and this and that but now I dread it.

‘I think being in here with the other jockeys is the thing I’d miss the most. It keeps you young. I’ll be there eating, chatting, in the sauna, with kids that are 18 or 20.

‘When you are in the weighing room, age doesn’t matter. Sure, I have to put my glasses on to read the Racing Post but mentally I’m doing the same stupid things the kids do, jokes and messing about.’

Dettori is many of the things you might expect him to be: irrepressible, articulate and charming. But there are surprises, too. For me, anyway.

I never quite trusted the image I saw on television, the laugh-along-with-Frankie entertainer on A Question of Sport nearly two decades ago, the cheeky chappy, the funny guy.

I thought that away from the cameras he would switch that smile on and off like the light in the weighing room. I thought what we were seeing was false. And I thought that by this stage in his career he would be cynical about racing, that he would say he could take it or leave it.

I thought the idea of retirement would barely register with him. I thought in his mind he had become an entertainer ahead of a jockey long ago.

Dettori listens to me articulate some of those thoughts. He shakes his head. ‘Completely wrong,’ he says. ‘I love the whole thing. I love the training, the worrying, the adrenaline, the winning, the losing, the whole package.

‘My job is entertainment. From the minute I walk out of the house to the minute I walk back in, I am speaking to people, making them feel good. It is part of what you do. You are an actor. And then the acting becomes easy because you have been doing it for so long. And even if you don’t have to act you are still doing it.

‘I had a few months away during the winter and when I came back I’m at a meeting and everyone’s shouting “Frankie, Frankie”.

‘That first week it was like some massive thing hit me right in the face. And then I realised: “I got to get back into acting again. Get back into being nice to everyone.”

‘When I started racing I had to be like that to get on in my career. You have to sell yourself. When you are a kid and no one knows who you are you have to sell yourself. That’s what you do. It’s partly my nature, too. I’m very Italian. Up and down.

‘My character is more Mediterranean than English. My wife says I have the concentration span of a flea and I do.’

Sometimes in the past it has been easy to fall into the trap of viewing Dettori, who will ride the Aidan O’Brien-trained Fairyland in the 1,000 Guineas this afternoon, as a personality, not a sportsman.

Maybe that is because Dettori set the trap. It has made it easier to forget that he is one of the greatest jockeys there has ever been, the only active Flat jockey that can be mentioned in the same breath as Lester Piggott.

Dettori has won 17 English Classics including the Derby twice and the St Leger five times. And he has ridden 3,157 winners. In more than 200 years of racing history only Sir Gordon Richards, Eddery, Piggott and Willie Carson have ridden more.

Since a six-month suspension for testing positive for cocaine in 2012 that many thought would finish his career, he has fashioned an inspiring comeback largely through a partnership with Gosden that brought him, among other glories, those back-to-back triumphs on Enable in the Arc.

The retirement of Ruby Walsh last week was a reminder to cherish greats like Dettori while they are still racing.

In fact, Dettori talks with rare candour. When he talks about his love for the sport and his partnership with Gosden, it does not feel like a performance. When he says that sometimes he drives to Gosden’s yard in Newmarket just so he can treat Enable to a packet of Polos or joke around with the stable lads he is not saying it for effect.

He is not afraid to admit his fears or his shortcomings. He does not pretend to be motivated now by riding at small meetings on Monday nights.

‘It doesn’t tickle me any more,’ he says. ‘I just don’t feel it. I have been doing it for so many years. If it’s a young kid and he’s got one ride, for him, it’s his Derby.

‘But I don’t want to be there. I have no interest whatsoever. It’s not because I lost the hunger. It’s because when you see me on a Saturday, I’m a different animal.’

It is also because of the accident that turned him into a happier man but a jockey who no longer cared so much about the call of history.

When Dettori climbs into the saddle on the ante-post favourite Too Darn Hot for the Investec Derby on June 1 it will mark an anniversary. It will be 19 years to the day since he cheated death in a light plane crash near Newmarket racecourse that claimed the life of the pilot, Patrick Mackey, and left Dettori with a broken ankle, cuts and bruises and a sense of deliverance that changed the course of his career.

‘For two years,’ he says, ‘I didn’t know, but apparently I wasn’t myself because of the trauma. It changed some things for the good, some things for the bad. The good thing was I started to enjoy life a bit more. But the bad thing was I could have been a lot better in my career.

‘My workrate prior to the plane crash was twice as much. Since then I took the foot off the gas a bit. The crash changed me a lot. What’s the point? If I rode 3,000 winners or 4,000 winners, who’s going to care?

‘That was because I’d seen life and death. The June 1, 2000 was when I had my crash and this year June 1 is the Derby. Nineteen years. So I better win it then.’

His career after the crash was not a steady trajectory. There were still years when he dedicated himself to the grind of the race for the jockeys’ championship. In 2004 he even outlasted the famously attritional and driven Kieren Fallon in an epic battle, although it is a defeat that he still cites as his abiding memory of that duel.

‘I’m 10 winners in front with two weeks left,’ says Dettori, ‘and we’re both exhausted. We’re riding two meetings a day and 10 races a day. I’m 10 in front but I have to keep 10 in front because he never stops. It was the end of October, I wanted to prepare for the Breeders Cup and there was a meeting the next day at Musselburgh.

‘So I called him and I said: “Listen, if you go, I have to go,” and he says: “Yeah, I’m f***ing going, yeah.” So my manager gets me three rides and I have to go. So I said to Kieren: “I’ll see you at Stansted on the 8am flight.”

‘I’m at the gate the next morning and I’m looking around and thinking: “Where is this f***er?” Then my phone rings and it’s Kieren. He says: “Well done for the championship. Bye.” He never turned up. I said: “You b*****d.” I had to go all the way to Scotland to ride three donkeys. I wanted to kill him. That was a good rivalry.’

That rivalry belongs to another era and Dettori laughs now at some of the inconveniences of middle age. He has pairs of glasses all around his house outside Newmarket that he shares with his wife and five kids.

‘There’s even a pair in the toilet,’ he says. ‘B*****d.’ His eldest son, Leo, 19, is a bartender in London living the life. ‘Gets in at 4 o’clock every morning,’ says Dettori fondly. ‘He’s a good boy.’

Nostalgia burns brightly in him as it does with so many sportsmen who can sense that they are in the final stages of their career. Three years ago he said he thought that he would ride for another five years and retire when he got to 50. ‘It seemed like a nice round number.’

He has changed his mind. Now he wants five more years.

‘I love it more than ever,’ he says. ‘I even enjoy getting up early in the morning to ride out. It’s funny: as you get older it’s easier to get up. I think it’s the fear of being late. When I was young I was late three times a week. Now it’s a phobia. I’ve got two alarm clocks in case one stops. You become responsible. I hate that word. You grow up.’

Ambition still burns brightly, he insists. He is still the jockey for the big occasion. He is looking forward to the 1,000 Guineas today.

He moved to the ride on Fairyland later in the week but earlier he was thinking he might be riding for O’Brien’s son Joseph, also a trainer. ‘I rode against him when he was a jockey,’ says Dettori. ‘It would be nice to ride for him, too.

‘I want to win all the big races again. My ambition is to get another good five years. In 19 months’ time I’ll be 50. That’s not far away.

‘I thought 50 was the magical age but f**k me, now 50 is around the corner. So I’m sure I can get another five years. I feel pretty good, yes. I used to ride 1,200 races a year. Now if I ride 250 or 300 it is a lot.

‘There are two reasons for that: first of all, all the big races are at the weekend. Second of all, the more you ride, the more chance you have got of getting injured.

‘The sport we do, you are going to fall sooner or later but you want to minimise the chance of getting hurt and that way hopefully will give me a little bit longer for my career. Because now when I fall, I break. The bones are harder. Bones crack. Do I think about my place in racing history? I’m up there with the big boys, aren’t I? When I started 32 years ago as a young Italian kid I didn’t even have a thought of getting that close. I was happy to be a middle-of-the-road jockey making a living but then everything just snowballed out of my control. It just happened.

‘I got addicted to it and I loved it and I carried on. But when I started I didn’t have great ambitions. I didn’t realise then I was this good. My dad was a champion jockey in Italy and when I was young that was too much to challenge. A bridge too far. Maybe I was frightened of that. Then it all just happened.

‘But that wasn’t my intention. I just wanted to make a living. Never mind winning the Derby, riding in it would have been an achievement.

‘Hopefully when I finish racing I’ll be able to do it on my own terms. You don’t want to stop with an injury. When I see I’m not as good as I used to be I’ll have to stop.

‘It would be insulting to myself watching myself deteriorate. One day I will have to face facts and stop but right now I don’t want to think about it.’

l The Investec Derby on Saturday, June 1 is part of the QIPCO British Champions Series investec.com/derby