Frankie Dettori interview: ‘I came second, and my dad still told me I f-----d up’

Frankie Dettori is agitated. Even though two chairs are set aside for this interview in his Park Lane hotel suite, he paces the floor at first, in the manner of a man with some unexpected news to deliver. “I’m not ready to retire,” he says, finally. “You’re the first person I’ve told officially. I’ve still got it in me, I want to carry on. I just feel I still have more to give.”

This comes, to put it mildly, as a jolt. The very premise for this conversation is meant to be his farewell to Ascot next Saturday, which he has spent months billing as his last ever as a jockey. And now, at 52, he is staying in the saddle after all? It must be the longest farewell tour since Frank Sinatra.

He knows how this might look, that there will be some who accuse him of milking the moment. But the truth is that Dettori, in his sixth decade, has struck one of his richest veins of form this year, with his triumph in the Ascot Gold Cup in June prompting him to kiss the Queen – rather startled in response – on the cheek. Ever the thespian, ever the protocol-breaker, he struggles to quench his thirst for one more curtain call. And so, after 36 years in Newmarket, the home of racing, he and his wife Catherine are packing up their house for a life in Los Angeles.

“I thought, ‘Why not? I’m not going to offend anyone if I carry on a bit longer in America,’” he reflects. “It has given me a new challenge. The kids have grown up, they’ve all left home. Catherine doesn’t have to do the school run any more. We can lock up and go.”

California: it seems a fitting destination for Dettori, who defies the privations of his craft to project the aura of a Hollywood actor. Even the setting for this meeting, at the opulent Grosvenor House Suites, reflects his fondness for glamour. His penthouse, almost the size of San Marino, has a grand piano in the foyer. When he emerges in the front room, dressed head to toe in black like a miniature Johnny Cash, he gives off the burnished glow of stardom.

Black is reputed to be a flattering colour at any age and Dettori wears it well. He looks impossibly youthful for a jockey of such vintage, his soft features a vivid contrast to the famously craggy Lester Piggott, who went by the nickname Old Stoneface. “Lester was 49 when he retired the first time but he looked 120,” he laughs. “All that smoking, you see. If I was washed out, I wouldn’t even be thinking of continuing. You need your body to follow your mind.”

In a curious way, Piggott still offers a template for what Dettori is striving to achieve. Within two weeks of coming back to racing at 54, Old Stoneface won the 1990 Breeders’ Cup on Royal Academy – a victory that, for all his nine Derbies, Piggott would later describe as his most satisfying feat. “Don’t forget, Lester had five years off,” Dettori grins. “I’m going straight through.”

He plans to ride full-time in the US beginning with the traditional opening day at Santa Anita on Boxing Day. How long will this latest encore last? “It could be three months, it could be three years. I need to get my head right, to get this out of my system, before I start thinking about anything else.”

This is an intriguing window into Dettori’s psyche. Hyperactive, irrepressible, he finds that the thrill of his sport is an addiction he cannot kick. He has sought to replicate the adrenalin rush elsewhere, from appearing on Big Brother to opening his own restaurant chain with Marco Pierre White, but nothing compares to the exhilaration of riding winners.

“The success I’ve been having lately has poured petrol on the fire,” he explains. “It’s the same if you’re a footballer and you’re still scoring goals. I was lining up a TV career after this, but that can wait.”

Sporting figures who script a glorious sunset often find themselves overwhelmed by thoughts of the darkness beyond. This was the experience of Roger Federer, who made last year’s Laver Cup in London his definitive farewell but who dissolved in heaving sobs as soon as the video montage of his greatest matches started playing. “Yeah, it would have been so hard just to stop like that,” he agrees. “That’s why it feels easier for me to face up to next weekend at Ascot. I know now that there’s a little bit of life afterwards.”

Champions Day at Ascot will still mark Dettori’s official goodbye to England. And this is, despite his restlessness to chase an American dream, a source of some anguish. “For sure, I’m going to cry,” he admits. “I’m quite an emotional person and I’ve spent more years of my life in this country than in Italy.”

He had his reservations about England at first, after his father Gianfranco sent him to learn his craft in Newmarket, only for him to be bullied by the stable lads. “Oh, I still have them,” he says, surveying a gloomy autumn evening over Hyde Park. “Look how dark it is out there. But this place has been good to me.”

Affection for Queen Elizabeth II

His adopted country will miss him immeasurably. It is not just that Dettori is a folk hero with his inimitable flying dismounts, but that he has become part of the racing establishment. Little expresses this quite like his affection for Elizabeth II. “I knew her for 30 years,” he says. “I won 50 races for her. If ever I was at a function, she would make sure to talk to me. It was a little bit of an escape for her. She could be in the bubble of something she loved.”

Dettori’s stories about the late sovereign are manifold. But there is one in particular he can hardly resist telling in full. Have you heard the one about him visiting the Queen to retrieve a missing sausage dog? Well, then let Frankie begin…

“It was a Sunday night,” he recalls. “I had just won the big race at Newmarket, so I threw a massive party. Word got around and there must have been 300 people. I was on the decks DJing. We have this lovely French window into the garden, so I let everybody out. People were drinking outside, dogs were running loose. In the end, we all crashed and burned. I woke up and the place was wrecked, bottles everywhere. And since we were all worse for wear, we had forgotten to close the doors.

“My dachshund used to leg it across the field chasing rabbits. And clearly she had done it again. Fortunately, she had a tag on with our phone number, and somebody picked her up off the street. This person was Caroline Warren – the wife of the Queen’s racing manager, John, who lived in the next village. She left a message on my answering machine, saying she had our dog. ‘Caroline, it’s Frankie, I’m very embarrassed,’ I told her. ‘When can we collect her?’ ‘We have a problem,’ she said. ‘We’re on our way to Sandringham to pick up the Queen. She’s staying with us tonight. Why don’t you come over at seven to say hello?”

“My wife had a hangover. She was mucking out the ponies. I opened the kitchen window and shouted, ‘Honey, I’ve found the dog.’ ‘Who’s got it?’ she asked. ‘The Queen,’ I said. ‘F--- off,’ she replied. ‘No, I’m not joking. I’m picking it up tonight.’ I said to my daughter, only 10 at the time, ‘Come on Ella, get your little dress on. We’re going to fetch the dog.’ Sure enough, we arrived at the Warrens’ place, and the Queen was sitting there with a gin and tonic.”

Dettori is hitting his exuberant stride now, springing up from his chair for extra dramatic effect. “‘Your Majesty, my daughter Ella,’ I announced. Ella curtseyed, while I poured myself a G&T. The Queen spent half an hour talking to Ella. ‘Do you ride ponies? What’s your pony called?’ I never got a word in. Only when dinner was nearly ready did they let the dog out. It ran towards me, across a beautiful Persian carpet. Unfortunately, she was so happy she p----d all over the carpet. Well, a little trickle really. But John said we had to leave. He kicked me out. At least the Queen was laughing.”

It was not the only occasion that Dettori encountered her earthy sense of humour or her bluntness. When she presented him with the King George trophy at Ascot in 2004, he told her proudly: “It’s my fourth time.” She shot back, unmoved: “Well, Lester Piggott won seven.” On the death of Queen Elizabeth last year, Dettori described feeling as if part of his soul had gone. Today, 13 months on, the sense of shock endures. “I had thought she was immortal.”

‘My Dad is straight to the point’ 

Growing up in Milan, Lanfranco Dettori never imagined he would brush shoulders with the Queen, still less that his dog would one day disgrace herself in her company. His childhood in Milan was complicated by his parents’ divorce, with his interest in horses not piqued until his father bought him a palomino pony called Silvia. Gianfranco, a 13-time champion jockey in Italy, was not the easiest man to please. For years, Frankie says, he would speak to his son disdainfully, convinced that Frankie lacked the natural riding talent to be a worthy heir.

He has long since been disabused of that idea. But the padre e figlio dynamic can still, as Dettori Jnr attests, be tempestuous. “Dad came to Paris a couple of weeks ago to see me finish second,” he says. “Straight away, he said, ‘You were too far back.’ That’s his nature.”

I put to him a comment by his sister, Sandra, that he has always needed his father’s harsh judgments for motivation. “Probably. My sister looks at it in a certain way. I see it in more professional terms. If I asked some friends what they thought, they would dress it up more nicely. My dad is straight to the point. If he thinks I’ve f----- up, he’ll tell me.”

‘Now we need you, show us how good you are’

Sometimes, Dettori can be his own toughest critic. When his wife was designing the rooms of their Suffolk house, she designated one of them “sulking room”. “It’s a massive house and I thought, ‘Great, I can have my own room.’ When Catherine was doing the keys and locks for every door, she came up with a ‘sulking room’, because when I lose, I lock myself in there. I just want to be by myself.”

They make a fascinating pair, Frankie and Catherine. He has the volcanic Latin temperament, but she has shown the calm necessary to balance the chaos of his racing ambitions with bringing up five children. They were shaped by sharply different backgrounds: one the son of a horseman and a circus performer who ended his education early, the other the daughter of a professor who followed her father into Cambridge. If Catherine was a self-described “blank canvas”, her husband could be a seething bundle of complexity. But their marriage, ever since their first date during Frankie’s days riding a moped around Newmarket, has proved a bedrock of his success.

Nothing resonated with him more than when Catherine told him, in the midst of his battle with bulimia and a subsequent ban for cocaine in 2012: “Now that we need you, show us how good you are.” The words hit him like a thunderbolt. They presented a challenge both to his pride and his commitment, and he responded as only he knew, purging his anger at being dropped as No 1 rider for Sheikh Mohammed’s Godolphin stables to forge a hugely rewarding partnership with trainer John Gosden.

Pressed on who pulled him through his darkest period, Dettori says, unhesitatingly: “My wife. We’ve all got our own resilience, in one way or another. When you’re cornered, you have to fight your way out of it. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but that’s what happened to me. Catherine knew how to get to me, she understood exactly what to say at the right time. If it had been anybody else, I probably wouldn’t have listened.”

There are sacrifices incurred in a sporting life as sweeping as Dettori’s. But he does not sound as if he would have had his family balance, with Catherine a stay-at-home mother while he built his global fame and fortune, any other way. “One regret is that I didn’t teach my kids Italian,” he says. “Even so, the little bit of them I saw was always special. We had winters in Dubai, we went skiing, we did safaris, I took them all around the world. We’re all guilty of saying we should have spent more time with our children. But you can’t be a successful sportsman and a nine-to-five dad.”

Dettori claims to have reassessed his priorities after he was almost killed in a plane crash 23 years ago. He and fellow jockey Ray Cochrane were flying on a Piper Seneca that was destroyed on take-off at Newmarket. But while his friend pulled him from the smouldering wreckage, the pilot, Patrick Mackey, could not be saved. Once Dettori recuperated from his broken ankle and facial cuts, he reordered his lifestyle, swapping countless hours in the weighing room for studio time on A Question of Sport.

What he gained in perspective, he lost in competitive edge. It is a shift that he looks back on with a certain ruefulness. “After the crash, I took my foot off the pedal, because I was a changed man,” he says. “Yes, I had more time for myself, more time with my wife. I began enjoying my life a bit more. But when I look at my stats, I’m not satisfied. I could have done a lot better.”

These remarks capture the essential dichotomy of Dettori, who can appear at peace one moment and in turmoil the next. He is adamant, however, that the extremes of old have been tempered. Take his eating habits: where he was bulimic for 10 years, trying to make weight using laxatives and diuretics, he now counsels moderation. “A lot of us jockeys have problems with our weight, in the same way supermodels do. It would still be a 1,000-1 shock if you saw me eating a burger. Even if my kids eat one, I won’t even try it. I train my mind not to. Steady diet, eating healthily, exercise – that’s what works.”

His eccentricities have been dialled down, too. “As an Italian, I used to have a million superstitions,” he recalls. “Everyone used to give me lucky charms that I’d wear around my neck. Horns, leaves, you name it. I could barely lift my head at one point. But I grew out of that as I got older. You make your own success when you work hard.”

All told, Dettori appears ready to embrace his next midlife adventure across the Atlantic. He might not have scratched the itch for winners, but he has quelled the party animal of his youth. At his wildest, he would stay out all hours in Hong Kong and lord it up in Dubai. Now, the thought of an early night in the suburbs of LA exerts a strange appeal. “Ten years ago, I still wanted to go out every night,” he says. “Now, honestly, if I have to go to bed at 9.30 over there, I won’t mind.”

It has taken nearly 40 years, but finally, against all odds, racing’s incorrigible maverick has mellowed.