Even if Frankie Dettori’s remarkable farewell show at Ascot on Saturday proves more arrivederci than addio, it’s hard not to suspect the Italian star’s capacity to engage public interest won’t be fully appreciated by racing until he’s gone.
Only Dettori’s unique appeal and showmanship could have turned Champions Day into such a raucously joyful expression of sporting fervour.
Having blotted his copybook with a late reveal of the retirement U-turn that sees him begin a career reinvention in California on St Stephen’s Day, the 52-year-old’s hold on public affections was underlined with a goodbye to Britain straight out of a Hollywood script.
Even an unlikely rally on Trawlerman to get the better of Aidan O’Brien Kyprios in the opening Long Distance Cup paled in comparison to how he pulled victory out of the fire on King Of Steel in the featured Champion Stakes.
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The skill and timing that persuaded the giant colt to dismiss his dislike of the soft going and swoop from last to first in the straight was remarkable in itself. But adding Dettori’s singular stardust to the mix turned the ultimate establishment location into an improbable public party.
Chants in the stands of ‘Oh Frankie Dettori’ to the tune of Seven Nation Army might have had Ascot grandees shaking their heads. But it spoke volumes of racing’s debt to the charismatic jockey’s capacity for boosting its popular reach.
He’s been doing it over four decades and if there’s consensus that Dettori will still be a fleeting presence in the biggest European races next year, absence is still likely to make such visits very fondly anticipated indeed.
[ Timing of Frankie Dettori’s ‘retirement’ U-turn strikes an unfortunate bum noteOpens in new window ]
Not since Lester Piggott and Red Rum has a racing figure penetrated the wider consciousness like this. In that sense he’s irreplaceable. Despite how his U-turn was handled, the reverse is ultimately good news all round, including perhaps back at Royal Ascot 2024.
Old ally John Gosden summed up general expectations about the weekend not being the last outburst of Frankie fever.
“It’s very clear to me. I teased him, I said I know what’s going to happen. You’re going to ride in California, you’ll ride all the Middle East festivals – Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi, Dubai – that gets you to the end of March.
“You try to find a Kentucky Derby horse, that takes you to May. Oh, funny thing, Royal Ascot is coming up! And I said you and John Velazquez, who is a great friend of his, you’ll be competing for rides at Ascot,” Gosden reported.
“We’ve been discussing this for three or four months and Frankie and I have talked it through. It’s very clear that you can’t stop stone cold and go cold turkey, that is something that would not suit him.
“Brian O’Driscoll, the great centre for Ireland, talks about it in After The Roar; as an athlete, it is always said that you don’t die once, you die twice.
“The point is, that if you’ve been completely committed every day – to training, business, riding horses, rugby, whatever – you are in a zone and it’s very hard suddenly to stare at a vacuum.
“The other thing Frankie feeds on is the crowd, we saw a very good example of that yesterday, while in a rugby game, you have a cauldron around you and suddenly that’s gone.
“That’s why a lot of them collapse, their mind just goes and they start hitting the bottle and everything else. So, for any athlete to stop, you die then, when you retire – and then you die when you die.
“I think for him, he couldn’t face that, so we talked about California and that was planned from a long way out,” added Gosden who all but sealed the British trainers title over Aidan O’Brien on Saturday.
Next up for Dettori will be a brief interlude in his new home in Santa Anita for the Breeders’ Cup before a possible trip to Australia which might be the one spot in the racing world that hasn’t fully fallen for him.
It is 30 years since Dettori first tried to win the Melbourne Cup but it has remained elusive and there’s no obvious ride on the horizon.
Closer to home, though, it was another top cross-channel trainer, William Haggas, who summed it up neatly when he declared: “We owe him so much and we will miss him – and I mean we really will miss him.”
O’Brien was out of luck at Ascot but took his Group One haul for 2023 to 18 with success in Sunday’s Criterium De Saint-Cloud in Paris.
His second-string Los Angeles, ridden by Christophe Soumillon, earned 20-1 quotes for next year’s Derby by leading home an Irish one-two-three. The colt beat off Joseph O’Brien’s Islandsinthestream by a neck with the apparent Ballydoyle number one, Illinois, three parts of a length back in third.
“He’s a very big horse and you’d imagine he’s going to be much better next year. We felt the experience would do him good and Christophe said he picked up very well.
“Joseph’s horse is a good colt and Illinois ran a stormer, but Christophe said Los Angeles could be a Classic horse and that’s something to look forward to,” O’Brien reported.
Soumillon also did best of O’Brien’s pair in the following Criterium International as Portland finished third to the English winner Sunway. The other Ballydoyle hope, Navy Seal, managed only fifth.
