“I’m sick and tired of the Derby,” Frankie Dettori said on Thursday. “Enough. I’ve done, finished. Don’t talk to me until Saturday night.” After three weeks of scrutiny, speculation and questions that can be answered only at 4.30pm on Saturday afternoon, his pre-race purdah beckoned. But if all the attention was beginning to get on top of him ahead of his ride on the favourite Golden Horn at Epsom on Saturday, Dettori has only himself to blame.
Two and a half years ago, in December 2012, his career was at a crossroads. He was not only out of a job, after an ugly, slow-motion split from Sheikh Mohammed’s Godolphin operation, which had supplied him with big-race winners for nearly 20 years. Dettori was out of racing too, about to start a six-month suspension after testing positive for cocaine while riding in France. He might have been turning into that staple of a Dick Francis novel, the washed-up ex-jockey who had it all and blew it.
Instead, via a brief stay in the Celebrity Big Brother house, Dettori chose the path back up the mountain. On Saturday afternoon, he will be a two-and-a-half minute gallop away from a return to the summit. And if Golden Horn allows him to plant another flag, the odd thing is that many of those tuning in briefly for the most famous Flat race in the world will not realise that he has been away at all.
Ask 100 people at random, Family Fortunes-style, who is the champion Flat jockey, and Dettori might well finish ahead of Richard Hughes, the champion for the last three seasons. Dettori himself, in fact, has won the title just three times in 28 years as a jockey in Britain, and the Derby, famously, just once, at the 15th attempt, in 2007. He has not even been booked for a ride in British racing’s showpiece event since 2011.
Yet Dettori is still the only Flat jockey that many people can name, the only rider of his generation to stake out a claim in the national consciousness. He is the one that rode seven winners in an afternoon at Ascot, all but cleaning out the bookmaking industry in the process, the one who used to be a team captain on A Question Of Sport. He survived a plane crash in 2000, in which the pilot was killed, after fellow rider Ray Cochrane, now his agent, pulled him from the wreckage. Dettori is the chirpy one who does chat shows, and opens restaurants with Marco Pierre White. Somehow, for some reason, most British adults have come across him somewhere.
But despite all the spin-offs and sidelines, the day job remains the one constant in Dettori’s professional life. His seven-winners afternoon at Ascot, a feat without precedent on one of the sport’s major days, was 19 years ago. He gave up A Question Of Sport in 2003, supposedly after one of the guest panellists asked him when he had retired from riding. He was Britain’s champion jockey for the third – and probably final – time a year later.
And whatever he might claim, Dettori is not sick and tired of the Derby, any more than it is sick and tired of him.
“Don’t you worry, he’s very excited about it,” Cochrane said this week. “He doesn’t want to talk about it now, when you get to this stage when you know the runners and the draw and you know the horse is in good shape, you just want to get there.
“But it means a lot to him and we’ve been talking about it a lot together, going through every scenario that could go wrong or right, where the pace will be, who is going to do this or that.”
The first major step in Dettori’s rehabilitation after his drugs ban came when he started to ride the wave of Qatari money flooding into Flat racing as first rider to Al Shaqab Racing. But his return to the spotlight in the Derby is thanks to a much longer association with John Gosden, Golden Horn’s trainer.
Reputation gets you only so far at the highest level of Flat racing, where the stakes are immense and you get only one chance. If Golden Horn proves to be the one horse among thousands of three-year-olds in his generation who is good enough to win the Derby, the £813,000 first prize will be an irrelevance when set against the multiple millions of pounds the colt will be worth as a potential stallion. A trainer as successful and experienced as Gosden does not entrust a Derby favourite to a rider because he had what it takes 10 years, or even 12 months, ago, but because he is certain that the jockey has it still.
“You never give up in racing because you never known what’s round the corner,” Cochrane says. “When William Buick [John Gosden’s former stable jockey and the rider of second-favourite Jack Hobbs on Saturday] went to Godolphin, I thought, this could be a good spot for us here, and while I was thinking about it, John was talking to Frankie about it. Frankie spent a lot of time with John in America when he was a kid, over in California. They spent time at Santa Anita together so they know each other really, really well and they work well together.”
One of the many questions that has driven Dettori to distraction in recent weeks is the one that nobody, even his jockey, can answer: will Golden Horn stay the 12-furlong trip well enough to win? “There will be no one going around there easier than him, that’s for sure,” Cochrane says. “He’s on the best horse in the race and he’s going to ride it like that. If he stays, he stays, and if he doesn’t, he doesn’t.”
When Dettori won his last jockeys’ championship 11 years ago, the runner-up was Kieren Fallon, whose reputation as a master of Epsom’s quirks and pitfalls is unrivalled. Yet while Dettori is back aboard a Derby favourite on Saturday afternoon, Fallon is in America, riding work and trying to arrest what looks like an irreversible decline. Perhaps Golden Horn will have the stamina to win and perhaps he will not. But if he has anything like the staying power of his jockey, the race is as good as won.
