THANK GOD FOR FRANKIE
Nation’s favourite keeps racing in the spotlight
FRANKIE DETTORI said he had never given up hope of being top jockey at Royal Ascot again as he picked up his sixth title yesterday — but his first since 2004.
And the racing industry had better hope the mercurial Italian does not walk away from the sport any time soon. When he goes, there will be a massive vacuum. Sport, like politics, loves a personality.
Neither 48-year-old Dettori nor Ryan Moore had a winner on day five but Dettori emerged as the meeting’s top jockey by seven wins to five.
Dettori equalled his previous best tally at the royal meeting set in 1998 and included his incredible 449-1 four-timer on Thursday, centred on a second successive Gold Cup win on board John Gosdentrained Stradivarius.
Dettori said: ‘It feels good, what a week with three Group One wins and a superb Thursday. I am stuck for words. I started the week with (the defeat of) Too Darn Hot and I thought it could have been one of those weeks.
‘But it picked up and you know the rest. We made headlines for the right reasons. I have finished close in recent seasons but Ryan has so much firepower from Aidan O’Brien and Coolmore. This week he hit the crossbar with seven seconds.
‘I didn’t have Enable or Calyx but I picked up Crystal Ocean and Advertise, so it works out. The magnificent Thursday with the crowd behind me made all the difference.’
It was also a great week for jockey Danny Tudhope, who picked up his fourth win on the Richard Faheytrained Space Traveller in the Jersey Stakes yesterday.
But Dettori, who has 67 career royal meeting wins, once again showed that on the big stage there is no one better. He might be racing’s Greatest Showman but he has also delivered a tactical masterclass and was being compared favourably to legendary Lester Piggott after he won Wednesday’s Queen Mary Stakes.
Perched on board in inimitable style, Dettori made sure he was in the right place at the right time on all his winners. The Italian lit up a rainsoaked Wednesday and lifted the spirits of the drenched crowd with victory on Crystal Ocean in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes. But his Thursday exploits were the highlight of the meeting, sending a surge of excitement around the track.
The winning streak helped push ITV figures to a peak of 1.4million, the highest for seven years, as the sport’s most popular jockey tried and failed to get win No 5 on Turgenev in the Britannia Stakes.
Unscheduled commentary of that race was also played out on BBC Radio 5 Live, holding up the news. It was another example of the Dettori effect, as was the fall-out from his Thursday four-timer. Some betting firms were so scared of running up more big Dettori-related liabilities that they refused to allow punters to place accumulator bets on him.
Dettori is quite simply out on his own as Britain’s best known Flat jockey. Having ridden since 1988, and despite previously saying he would like to ride against son Rocco if he can fulfil his jockey ambitions, the reality is Dettori probably has only four or five seasons left.
ITV anchor Ed Chamberlin is in no doubt Dettori played his part in ITV’s positive viewing figures last week. Chamberlin said: ‘You can just imagine people at work, messaging their friends and saying: “Have you seen what Dettori’s doing?”. There was a massive Dettori factor. That’s shown by the fact that more people watched Turgenev’s race than the Gold Cup.
‘Footballers like Messi and Ronaldo bring people into sport through ability not character. Frankie does it with a bit of both. AP McCoy summed it up brilliantly on Friday when he said on ITV that Frankie genuinely believes that 70,000 people come to Royal Ascot to watch him and he is putting on a show for them.’
Chamberlin’s ITV colleague Jason Weaver, a friend and one-time weighing room colleague of Dettori, said: ‘Surprisingly, he was good in the rain this week because normally he is awful. He is not like Lewis Hamilton. But on the big days, he’s the best.’