Frankie: The Autobiography of Frankie Dettori

The Autobiography of

FRANKIE DETTORI with JONATHAN POWELL

To my dad Gianfrancowho never doubted that I would make itas a jockey, even when I was not sure.A thousand thanks.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

One: I Knew I Was Going to Die

Two: Against the Odds

Three: Lost in My Father’s Shadow

Four: Growing Up Fast

Five: I Used to Cry Myself to Sleep

Six: Riding Like an Italian

Seven: Priceless Lessons in California

Eight: Give the Kid a Chance

Nine: A Job Made in Heaven

Ten: Too Big For My Boots

Eleven: Giving in to Temptation

Twelve: Throwing it All Away

Thirteen: Arrested with Cocaine in My Pocket

Fourteen: Sheikh Mohammed Offers a Lifeline

Fifteen: Champion Jockey

Sixteen: A Lion in Paris

Seventeen: Godolphin Comes Calling

Eighteen: The Bookies Were Crying for Mercy

Nineteen: Nobody Had Done It Before

Twenty: A Brief Encounter at Epsom

Twenty-one: Nightmare in Kentucky

Twenty-two: A Horse in a Million

Twenty-three: A Miraculous Escape

Twenty-four: In the Grip of Lester

Twenty-five: An Emotional Night in New York

Twenty-six: A Question of Sport

Twenty-seven: Slow Boat to China

Twenty-eight: Summer of Despair

Twenty-nine: Top Dog Again

Career Record

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

One I Knew I Was Going to Die

Death came calling with terrifying suddenness on a bleak summer’s day in 2000. It happened as Ray Cochrane and I were taking off in a small plane from Newmarket racecourse on the sort of routine flight to the races that had been part of my daily schedule for the past fifteen years.

One moment we were sitting side by side in the rear seats as our Piper Seneca bumped alarmingly along the grass runway on that wet and windy June morning. The next I knew with horrible certainty that I was about to die as our little plane, fatally damaged on take-off, struggled to reach a height of perhaps 100 feet before plunging towards Devil’s Dyke, a huge ancient bank and ditch that lies between the July track and the main course at Newmarket.

White smoke was already streaming from a crippled engine, and there were the first signs of flickering flames as our doomed aircraft tilted crazily onto its right side, hampered from the lack of full power when we needed it most. In front of us our pilot Patrick Mackey was fighting manfully at the controls to keep us in the air long enough to avoid the dyke on our way down, but his task was impossible from the moment the right-wing engine propeller gouged into the ground just before lift-off.

Not too many people in full health know beyond doubt that they have only a few seconds to live. Ray was icy calm as we waited for the impact that would end it all. Next to him I wasn’t so controlled.

‘We’re going to die mate, we’ve had it!’ I screamed.

So many people have asked me what it was like to stare death in the face. It’s impossible to explain because it all seemed to happen so quickly. I was certain that it was all over, finished, as if somebody had pressed a button to end my life. I was also terrified that it was going to hurt like hell, but my main feeling was one of disappointment at the waste of it all, that I would never see my wife Catherine and little boy Leo again.

The left wing tip was just about vertically above the other wing as we dived towards the bank and the ground rushed up to meet us. If we’d crashed nose first onto the dyke we would all have been killed instantly, no question—smashed to pieces like flies on a car windscreen.

By some miracle Patrick nearly managed to clear the dyke—until the extreme tip of the right wing clipped the top of the bank. This sent us cartwheeling into the ground on the other side of the ditch. The noise of the impact seemed to last forever.

It was a nightmare sound I’ll never forget.

At a time like this you have no control over your fate. If the plane had ended upside down we would all have been trapped in the wreckage and burned to death. There would have been no escape as more than sixty gallons of aviation fuel ignited. Even though we settled the right way up, the force of the impact left Ray unconscious for a few seconds, and I was out of it too.

When we came to our senses we were still strapped in our seats, with the passenger door on my left squashed in on top of me. No escape route there. In front of us poor Patrick was slumped unconscious over the controls, flames were coming from the engines and the horrible smell of fuel was overpowering. I was already aware of a dreadful pain in my right leg. There was also so much blood on my face from deep cuts on my forehead that I thought I’d been blinded. Ray immediately took charge, thank goodness, or I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.

Spotting that the tiny door used to stow baggage immediately behind my seat was ajar, he kicked the rest of it out, then squeezed forward again to undo my seat belt, dragged me backwards and pushed me out of the narrow opening. The drop onto the ground was probably no more than eighteen inches but I landed on my injured ankle and immediately began screaming from the pain, unable to move.

Lying in a heap near the remains of the tail plane, I was still far from safe.

Terrified that I could be trapped by the flames at any moment, I cried out to Ray for help as he was turning back to try to save Patrick. When he heard me he came back, pushed himself through the broken hatch and dragged me thirty yards or more to safety just as the fire was really starting to take hold.

Then he immediately rushed back determined to rescue Patrick, but by the time he reached the wreckage flames were beginning to appear underneath the plane. Ray should have given up at that point but he was unbelievably brave. Showing total disregard for his own safety, he forced open the pilot’s door on the right-hand side, leaned in, reached towards Patrick and was just about to release his belt when there was a whoosh and the whole lot went up.

Driven back by the ferocity of the inferno and already suffering from burns, Ray then struggled round to the other side of the plane to have another go through the hatch that had provided our escape. By now the first rescuer had appeared, a racecourse worker, who was begging Ray at the top of his voice to get away from the flames, yet still he persisted.

The last image I have of this incredible rescue attempt was of Ray taking off his jacket and trying to use it to beat out the flames, then collapsing in tears of rage, overcome with guilt at being unable to save Patrick, before crawling over to comfort me.

We lay huddled together in an advanced state of shock, like two small refugees silhouetted by the fire. Then the cavalry began to arrive. Soon we were both trussed up and on our way by helicopter to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. The last thing we wanted after our ordeal was to be flying again so soon, but we were in no condition to argue.

As we lay in emergency, shocked, hurting and distressed, neither of us knew quite how badly we were injured. I remember thinking: Why go on as a jockey? What’s the point? I had a lovely wife and a bouncy little son. There was so much more to life than racing. Why not jump off the treadmill and take things easy for a change?

Then I began to realise that God had saved me. I was going to die and he spared me. Why? Obviously it wasn’t my time. And because my life almost ended far too soon, I decided there and then that I was going to make the most of it the second time around.

Two Against the Odds

As a small boy I wanted to be a petrol pump attendant when I grew up. Well, the price of petrol was very high then. It seemed like a rewarding career. Later I fancied myself as a professional footballer, but it was my destiny to become a jockey. My dad Gianfranco was champion jockey thirteen times in Italy and also won lots of big races in England, but he didn’t sit on a horse until he was twenty and stumbled into racing by chance after he left the family home in Sardinia to seek fame and fortune on the mainland.

His father Mario, my grandfather, had an iron will. He stood little more than 5ft 2in tall and came from a family who were often penniless. He was a man’s man—tough, stubborn, hard as nails—and could be an absolute bastard. We all called him Super Mario and you will soon understand why. He was doing odd building jobs, earning money where he could—sometimes in the mines at Carbonia—when Italy became involved in the Second World War in June 1941 as an ally of Germany.

Soon the Germans were everywhere in Sardinia with several army barracks, but at least there was no fighting on the island. Once my grandfather joined the Italian Army he was based full-time in barracks, which was a bit of a problem because his wife Apollonia lived thirty miles away from the camp. He used to tell me stories of how he cycled over to see her whenever he was free. Since the tyres on the bicycle were old and worn, his journey would often be interrupted by punctures which he mended with the crudest of equipment.

Mario’s love for my grandmother cost him dear. When he failed to return to camp in time one Monday morning he was put on a charge and locked in a cell for a month. The second time it happened they tied him to a pole in the middle of a courtyard and left him there for several days, maybe a week. Ants creeping all over his body made him so itchy that they nearly drove him mad. In desperation he shook the pole so hard that it broke and came crashing down and he was put in a cell once more. You might think that he had learned his lesson by then, but the Dettoris are resolute in matters of the heart. Once he’d completed his sentence he rushed off for a reunion with my grandmother and failed to return to barracks before the curfew yet again.

This time there was no escaping serious punishment. Mario was immediately sent to the front at Montecassino early in 1944, where one of the fiercest battles of the war was raging around the famous monastery—which was eventually destroyed by Allied bombers after months of heavy fighting. It came at the point in the war when the Allies were trying to drive the Germans out of Italy. Casualties were horribly high in the battle for Montecassino, south of Rome. It was a bloodbath. Mario told me he spent six months crouching in the trenches there and escaped with no more than a small scratch on his arm from a stray bullet.

The way he told it to me years later, rain fell for weeks on end and the only way he managed to keep himself from sinking into the mud at night was by sleeping on a lilo in the trenches. He smoked incessantly, and quickly learned never to put his head above the parapet—for the very good reason that those who did immediately came under fire, often with fatal results.

Once Italy was liberated by the Allies, Mario returned home to Sardinia and started working in the local mines at Carbonia which supplied coal for much of the mainland. Since he was a builder he had the perilous job of erecting a barrier with bricks and cement at great speed to stop fire spreading whenever it broke out. This required great skill and courage because he was obviously the last man out when a fire started. Mining was much more primitive then and he saved quite a few lives.

My grandparents had six children, all boys, but one died at birth. Pepe was the oldest followed by Gianfranco, Salvatore, Sandro, and finally Sergio. Eventually Mario left the mines and began his own building business, though there were months at a time when he was unemployed. As the boys grew up and left school they all began working for him. My dad remained at school until he was sixteen, which was like going to university in those days in such a poor community.

My dad was pretty cute and soon realised there was more to life than toiling away for his father for ten hours or more a day, mixing cement for the modest reward of just a bowl of pasta with beans and a roof over his head. After months of hard labour he couldn’t see any sort of future. So, one day, with huge blisters on his hands, he hurled his bucket and shovel into a well and informed my grandfather that he was leaving home. Mario’s response was typical: as my dad walked away he heard Mario shouting that he needn’t bother to return.

Gianfranco just about had the price of a ticket for the ferry that took him to the mainland. He headed for Rome and stayed with one of his brothers until he found a job washing plates in a restaurant. Soon he moved on to a second restaurant where he lived in the cellar with his sparse belongings. These he kept on a shelf to avoid the attention of rats. When it poured with rain one night, the cellar flooded and everything he owned was swept away.

Dad was left with nothing, but you are resilient at that age and all he cared about at the time was chasing the girls and smoking cigarettes. He was just exploring life and worked like hell to pay for his fun. He switched from washing dishes to selling fruit and veg at a market stall. This also involved making home deliveries, a job that offered unexpectedly exciting perks from some of the housewives he met on his daily rounds.

My dad was smart, had a bit of charm and an easy smile. He was hungry for life and kept moving on, looking for a break. One of the stall holders was a policeman who also owned three trotting horses, stabled at Tor di Valle racecourse in Rome. Soon Dad began looking after these three horses, even though at first, he didn’t have a clue what to do with them. He learned by asking and watching other lads at nearby stables, and within a week he was quite efficient at attaching the horses to the sulky, which is the little chariot used in trotting. He was also feeding the horses and mucking them out twice a day, throwing out the manure, adding fresh straw, and brushing around their stables.

He did this all by himself in return for an unlimited supply of cigarettes, as many packs as he could puff his way through. He was small, stocky, extremely fit and bright enough to realise that there wasn’t much money in looking after trotting horses. Some friends suggested he switch to the Capannelle, then the home of Italian horse racing. So he turned up there, offered his services to the first trainer he met, and at the age of eighteen signed up as an apprentice for five years—even though he’d never sat on a horse in his life. It was the start of an odyssey that would make him the most successful jockey in the history of Italian racing.

In those days an apprentice in racing was not much more than a slave, expected to do all the hard, dirty, dangerous and menial jobs for minimal reward. In the first few months he toiled away, cleaning out stables, sweeping the yard, and feeding the horses without so much as climbing onto their backs. The opportunity he craved came in the most unlikely circumstances. The adjoining stable at the Capannelle housed a lunatic racehorse called Prince Paddy. My dad says it was so mad that no-one dared go near it. The only way they could brush its coat with any degree of safety was with a long-handled broom. When the man who trained and looked after this crazy horse became ill with flu, no-one wanted to risk handling the beast in his absence.

That’s where my dad stepped in. He must have been mad too, because in addition to grooming Prince Paddy he decided to ride him at exercise. Young, fearless, and frustrated at the way things were turning out, he ended up begging to ride the one horse in the place that terrified everyone who came near it. People at the track feared the worst when he led the beast out of the stable and jumped onto its back. They all assumed it would be only a matter of time before my dad was sent crashing to the ground. Instead the pair hacked round together at a gentle pace as though they’d done it a thousand times before. It was the same when they teamed up again the next morning.

So that was how my dad started in racing. Eventually he partnered Prince Paddy every day, got his licence and rode the horse in his first race. To general amazement they won. My dad had experienced a very tough upbringing and believes the hunger and anger inside fired his ambition. By the time he reached twenty-one he had managed only five winners, three of them on Prince Paddy—yet within four years he was champion of Italy. Once he got there he was never going to throw it away. He was the best. No question.

Three of his brothers followed him into racing. Sergio became a very successful jockey too, with upwards of 1,500 winners and still rides a little bit while concentrating on his new career as a trainer. Sandro was also a jockey and is still involved as head lad to a trainer in Pisa. Pepe worked for years as a groundsman for the Italian Jockey Club. Salvatore was the outrageous one of the family. I don’t recall ever meeting him—which is a shame because everyone says he was a lovely bloke. He was strong as an ox but never really channelled his energy in the right direction. Instead he became an alcoholic and died in 1996 when he choked on his own vomit.

As a young jockey my dad was so disciplined that he was in bed at nine every evening, his jodhpurs laid out nearby without a single crease in them, ready for an early start in the morning. You could say he was single-minded to the point of obsession, and who could blame him. For years he’d been toiling away in filthy jobs for meagre reward, and unlike a lot of young jockeys with easy money in their pockets he wasn’t in a hurry to throw it all away.

It was the time of Molvedo, who followed in the hoofbeats of the mighty Ribot a few years earlier by winning Europe’s greatest race, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, for Italy. Initially Dad was second jockey to Ribot’s rider Enrico Camici. He learned much from Camici, but when he became champion he forged a strong alliance with the trainer Sergio Cumani in Milan—which, by then, was becoming the centre of Italian racing.

My parents married after a whirlwind romance that began when my father visited a travelling circus in Milan. His Saturday nights were spent with his friends either at the cinema or at the Circo Russo—which stretched to a pair of camels, a few monkeys, three or four lions and a resident clown. That evening he chose the circus, chiefly because it was next to the racecourse, and was immediately captivated by a gorgeous young girl in the ring with long black hair all the way down to her calves. She had a variety of roles that evening, including trapeze artist, contortionist, juggler and balancing athletically on the backs of two horses, one leg on each, with reins in her hands as they cantered side by side around the tight circus ring. She was also tied to a rotating wheel of fortune while some idiot wearing a headband threw knives at her!

Sitting in the front row, smartly turned out in a suit and tie, his brand new Vespa parked outside the big top, my dad couldn’t take his eyes off this girl. For him it was a case of love at first sight. My mother’s name is Iris Maria, but everyone calls her Mara. She was only sixteen that fateful night, like a rose about to bloom, and Dad made a point of meeting her afterwards. She had spent her entire life on the move with the rest of the family in the circus which originally came from Russia. They lived like a travelling band of gypsies. My dad pursued her relentlessly, swept her off her feet, and they were married a few short months later in 1963.

They were like two pigeons cooing at each other for sure. Theirs was a grand passion, but it was not an easy marriage because my mum had only known life on the road with the circus. She hardly ever attended school because she was always moving on to the next venue. As a result she can hardly read or write. We never did discover the identity of her father, but my grandmother Secondina, who never married, was one of two sisters who suffered terrible injuries to their legs when a caravan toppled over onto them when they were young children. Her sister was called Terzilla and their elder brother Primo. They all lived a nomadic life, earning peanuts and living in caravans as the circus rolled on from town to town each week.

My uncle Claudio was the resident clown. With a big belly and white tee-shirt he’s the spitting image of Onslow from the TV programme Keeping Up Appearances. Claudio was offered a house by his local council, but he was so used to life on the road that he turned it down to continue living in his own spartan caravan.

Once my parents married, my mother’s days as a trapeze artist were over. She was totally fearless then, but now she can’t bear to travel to England to see me because she’s frightened of driving through the Channel Tunnel and even more terrified of flying. It’s got to the stage where she won’t even go up an elevator in a department store. So I keep in touch by phone and try to visit her whenever I am in Italy.

My sister Alessandra (who we call Sandra) was born in 1965. I followed five years later. Dad wanted my name to be as similar as possible to his. At first he considered calling me Gianfranco too, but eventually decided that if I became a jockey then Gianfranco Dettori junior was too much of a mouthful. So Lanfranco it was, although everyone in England has been calling me Frankie for years. I’ve inherited my suppleness and athleticism from my mother—and, of course, the agility and balance to carry out my trademark flying dismount. From my dad came the drive and desire to make it to the top.

By the time I was born on 15 December 1970 my parents’ marriage was virtually over. I learned much later that at the time of my birth my father was away riding that winter in Australia and he was already involved with Christine, who eventually became my stepmother. They had met that August when he was riding in Deauville. From the start she shared his ambition and he must have known that his marriage to my mother was coming to an end even before I was born.

One of the problems was that my mother hated horseracing. To her it is a stupid pastime. She is a lovely person, beautiful, though completely down to earth, and having given up the nomad’s life she couldn’t settle to domesticity. She never really understood what drove my father—and later me—to devote our lives to making horses run as fast as they possibly can. He would come home full of himself explaining that he’d won the big race, and she’d reply ‘What race?’ In those days it was important for him to have someone who could share and enjoy his achievements and my mum couldn’t do that.

Nor did she appreciate the strict disciplines involving my father’s weight, so he could never be sure his supper would be on the table each evening at 6.30 after a long day’s work. My father was so single-minded in his pursuit of success that he became more and more well-known and eventually my mum was being left behind. She loved him for who he was, not for the fact that he was the most famous jockey in Italy. By becoming so successful he needed somebody to take him further, and perhaps my mum wasn’t educated enough to take the next step with him. She preferred to retain her simple lifestyle as a housewife and couldn’t cope with the fame that came with all his high-profile winners. I don’t blame her for that. It’s just the way she is.