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 Dettori got changed at the far end when he first started racing more than 30 years ago
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.
A decade later the jockey found himself in the seat closest to the door in the weighing 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.
Dettori is everything you might expect him to be: irrepressible, articulate and charming
‘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.
‘My job is entertainment. From the minute I walk out of the house to the minute I walk back in'
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.
The legendary jockey talks to the Mail on Sunday Chief Sports Writer Oliver Holt at Epsom
‘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
