Frankie: The Autobiography of Frankie Dettori

Three Lost in My Father’s Shadow

In the late 1970s my father was flying as a jockey. He was the undisputed champion of Italy and increasingly gaining recognition abroad, but to me he was little more than a ghost—a distant, cold, intimidating figure. Life was still pretty tough for the rest of us at the Dettori home in Milan. There were many weeks during the height of the season when I saw him perhaps once in seven days. Usually he left before I was up and returned long after I’d gone to bed, and twice a week he set off at dawn to ride in Rome.

Towards the end of each summer he would be so far ahead of the other jockeys in the battle for the championship that he’d take a short break from domestic racing with a holiday abroad, followed by a few engagements riding in international events around the world. Then he tended to go away for the winters.

I’d often stay with my Godmother, Teresa Colangeli, who acted as my second mum and looked after me in the winter when Dad was away. She was married to a trainer called Vincenzo. When he died fifteen years ago she took over the training licence and is still doing well with her team of horses in Varese. One of her owners, Giuseppe Molteni, is the most successful amateur rider in Italy—and probably the world—with close on a thousand winners. He won three races in a week as recently as February 2004, and still rides out every day at the age of 74. Teresa provided a refuge when I needed one most and was always generous with her time and support. I still speak to her when I can because she has played a big part in my life.

On the days that my father was around when I came home after school, he was a grim, forbidding figure. It was a bit like finding Roy Keane or Graeme Souness in your kitchen. At least he greeted me with a smile and a kiss, but after that he would pop upstairs to change into his shorts, come back down again, watch the news on television without saying a word, then retreat behind his newspaper for the rest of the evening as he studied the form for the next afternoon’s card.

Conversation wasn’t encouraged. If I suggested doing something, Christine’s stock reply would be that he was racing the following day so please don’t bother him. I can’t say it upset me much because I was used to it. His riding always came first and you could see that he was a man with a mission. If things became tricky because I stepped out of line, Sandra did her best to protect me. If necessary she would lie for me, but he could be very rough with her. She was the one who bore the brunt of it. I can remember one incident when he made her kneel in a tray of salt which was an incredibly painful punishment. That kept me quiet for a while because I didn’t fancy the same fate.

He was very wrong in the way he treated us as youngsters but he didn’t know any different. That was how he’d been brought up too, so he was simply sticking to the same rules. Many years later he admitted to me that no-one taught him how to be a father. Now he is as nice as pie and we get on famously.

Most nights Sandra and I used to cry ourselves to sleep. My sister is very strong-willed and by the time she was fourteen she was determined to run away. She told me of her plans to escape back to mum. Sure enough, one day after school she didn’t come home. When my dad realised what had happened he was furious and there was the most terrific row in the kitchen that night as I was going to bed. The upshot was that I was suddenly on my own with Dad and Christine. This proved to be the turning point in my life. In all my time at school Dad had never come to collect me at the end of the day, but the very next afternoon there he was leaning out of the driving seat of a horsebox near the school gates, waiting for me. I can still remember the excitement I felt the moment I spotted him. I dashed up to the lorry, climbed into the front seat and gave him a big kiss.

He promised me a big surprise and he wasn’t kidding. We set off through the streets of Milan until we pulled up a few miles away beside a field that contained three ponies, two that were bay and a palomino. The choice was mine and I had no hesitation in picking the palomino with its white face, mane and tail. For me it was love at first sight. We took the pony home and put her in a field with stabling belonging to a farmer barely a hundred yards from our house.

Looking back now, I think my sister’s sudden departure acted like an electric shock on my father. He realised he’d lost his daughter and was frightened of losing me, too. So he bought the pony to keep me happy. It’s funny how things work out in life. If my sister hadn’t run away and my dad hadn’t bought that pony called Silvia, I might never have become interested in racing. Up until that point I had hated racing, chiefly because I found it so boring. Instead I spent all my time playing football at school and in my spare time. Once I had the pony I had to start looking after it and soon I was taking all my mates from school to watch me riding it round the field pretending to be a jockey.

Having your own pony at the age of eight in a field close to the middle of Milan was quite a novelty in those days, a bit like keeping a tiger in the centre of London. Until then I hadn’t enjoyed my brief skirmishes at riding school. I was as scared as hell, and hated it, perhaps because I was so small. I’d been overshadowed by my sister in whatever I did. She was the posh one, but when she left there was nobody else to lean on, so I had to grow up fast. Having my own pony certainly helped.

On a rare day off at home my dad took me out to the stables, tied up Silvia and demonstrated how to groom her properly and muck the stable out until it was spotless. He said he would only show me once. He brushed her coat, mane and tail, used a pitchfork to remove the dung in the box and replace it with fresh straw, banked it up around the walls, cleaned out the manger, brought in hay for her to eat, and filled the water bucket with fresh water. It was an impressive lesson from a master, for this had once been his daily task as a stable lad in Rome and would eventually become mine when I became an apprentice. It was fun in the summer, but once winter arrived looking after Silvia became a horrible chore. Working in the dark in freezing weather didn’t appeal to me then and doesn’t appeal to me now.

There were consolations. I would rush home from school, put on my jodhpurs and racing silks in the colours of Carlo d’Alessio, run out to the stables, saddle up Silvia and set off on her at a million miles an hour around the field. There was no question of grooming her first or cleaning out her droppings. That lesson from Dad had already been forgotten! All I wanted to do was ride like the wind with my knees under my chin. I never had any doubt that I would be a jockey.

I was barely nine when I rode in my first Derby at the San Siro track in Milan. Never mind that it was only a pony race—to me it felt like the greatest race on earth. I trained and practised for weeks on Silvia in the field at home, but on the big day I was horrified to discover that all the others ponies were giants compared to Silvia and all the other jockeys giants compared to me. The course for this Derby was laid out on the jumping track between the last two fences and probably stretched to less than half a mile. It seemed like a marathon to me and I was a nervous wreck as we formed a ragged line at the start.

There was no fairytale start to my career as a jockey, quite the opposite. It was a case of ‘slowly away, then faded’ for Silvia and her hapless rider. Once the starter’s flag fell we were left behind and were tailed off throughout. To add insult to injury, when Silvia saw the crowd at the finishing line she dug in her toes and sent me sprawling into the water jump.

Despite that humbling setback, my days at school were largely spent dreaming of riding when lessons were over. I was quick at maths and liked geography. In those two subjects I was a furlong ahead of the rest of the class. But I was hopeless at history and my stumbling attempts at English were embarrassing. If only I’d paid more attention to my English teacher.

Silvia and I were inseparable for about a year but the novelty quickly wore off when she began to get the better of me. She was strong and increasingly wilful and there were too many times when I couldn’t control her. She was taking advantage of me, knew every trick in the book, and soon there were days when I was too frightened to ride her. Our partnership came to a painfully abrupt end one afternoon when she ran off with me under a metal paddock rail. I grabbed the pole in an attempt to save myself, but it broke off in my hands and fell onto my chest as I hit the ground. I was in so much pain I could hardly breathe. I thought my ribs were broken, and by the time I was on the way to hospital I’d decided riding was definitely not for me. My plans as a jockey were in tatters. Luckily Dad took the hint and promptly sold Silvia. After that I didn’t go near a horse for a year.

As the smallest boy at school I was the obvious target for bullying, but I became quite adept at avoiding nasty incidents. Christine, who used to work in a bank, offered some sound advice when she suggested thinking my way out of tricky situations. I was dead sharp even then and much cleverer than the bullies, so I usually managed to work my way out of trouble when danger threatened. Somehow I could fiddle my way around confrontations. I didn’t have that many scraps because I usually managed to sidestep when danger threatened. Nothing much has changed since then!

Despite my size, I played a mean game of football at school during the long lunch break which stretched to an hour and a half in the hot Italian sun most days. I was small, light and nippy on my feet and spent most of the time as a goal-hanger lurking near the penalty spot, trying to convert any chances that came my way—and was disappointed if I hadn’t scored a hatful by the end of the game. If the final score was 23-17 then I’d sometimes be responsible for eight or ten of them. I saw myself as Roberto Bettega, who was a famous centre-forward for Juventus in the seventies.

Although we lived in Milan, I supported ‘Juve’—based in Turin—from the moment an uncle gave me one of their shirts for Christmas. I wore it all the time, which was quite a brave thing to do if you lived in Milan. Naturally my first heroes were all giants of Juventus. Initially Roberto Bettega was my inspiration, but I switched my allegiance to Liam Brady when he moved from Arsenal in June 1980. Liam was outstanding in Italy and won two Italian championships with Juve.

A few years later, when I was working for Luca Cumani in Newmarket, I finally met Liam when he came to an open day at the yard. For once in my life I was speechless, hopelessly star-struck, yet he was keen to talk to me because I’d ridden a few winners by then. It was very strange. Liam loves his racing, and whenever I can get to an Arsenal game at Highbury—where he is now head of youth development—I give him a call and meet up with him. Michel Platini, who followed Liam to Juventus, was another of my early heroes.

In those days my pals and I used to climb over the gates into the San Siro stadium at around eleven in the morning, a good three hours before kick-off. We’d hide in the grandstand until people started coming through the turnstiles. That way we could watch the Milan games for free and the money we saved would be spent on tickets for the basketball. Alas, my dream of a football career moved rapidly downhill after a long summer’s holiday when I was about twelve. By the time I returned to school everyone else had grown a foot and I seemed to have shrunk, so I used to get a right pasting when the big boys tackled me. Even so, the manager of the boys’ team I played for at the weekends felt I deserved my turn as captain.

On the big day, the parents of all the other boys turned up to support them but as usual my father was off riding somewhere—and as Christine always accompanied him I was the only one there without family. It hurt at the time and, you know, I can already see the same thing happening with my son Leo when he starts to play competitively in a few years’ time. Every Saturday and Sunday I have to work, too, so he will be missing his dad if he plays football at weekends.

A source of endless fun for me and my friends came at the races on the days we all pretended to be horses and staged our own sprints. Each racehorse carried a plastic number on its bridle in the paddock. These were often discarded before the competitors cantered to the start. We’d collect the numbers, attach them to the belts of our trousers and have our own series of races using branches torn from trees in the park as makeshift whips to whack our own legs.

After a year’s break from ponies I started to get the old hunger back for riding once more. The spark for my renewed interest came from writing reports for the school magazine on the racing at Milan, which my dad tended to dominate. For a while at school I was like a racing reporter. I would go with him to the races at the weekend, have a flutter with my friends, then on the Monday morning I’d cut out the pictures of the finishes from the local paper and write my articles around them. Sometimes I filled as many as six pages with photographs and reports. That was the limit of my endeavour in the classroom. Usually I let two fingers of dust grow on my school books while I sat at my desk dreaming about horses.

Those early trips to the races opened my eyes to the riches that racing offered. Once in a while my dad would take me with him to Rome on a long weekend. The drive from Milan could take up to five hours on the Saturday and we would then walk the track on Sunday morning. One day he pointed out Lester Piggott, who was already a legend with nine Derby winners. ‘Look at him’, said Dad. ‘You could be just as successful if you work hard enough.’ It was a lofty ambition and it made a big impression on me.

We were out on the course at Rome on the morning of the 1981 Italian Derby when we ran into a group of English jockeys, including a baby-faced teenager called Walter Swinburn. I was wearing a tee-shirt and short trousers and here was this young jockey who was all the rage looking hardly any older than me. Glint of Gold, trained by Ian Balding, won the Italian Derby that year, and just over three weeks later he finished a distant second in the Derby at Epsom to Shergar ridden by the same Walter Swinburn.

While Dad was busy riding through the afternoon my mates and I were betting on every race. The pocket money he gave me was usually spent on bets at the Tote window. Most of my pals then were sons of jockeys, too, but we never seemed to benefit from inside information and thought we’d done well if we were left with a few lire after the last race.

Soon I was back at riding school for more lessons. Although I felt a bit stronger and more confident than before, I was hardly prepared for the next step when I started riding out in the school holidays with Carlo d’Alessio’s string of horses, which by then was trained by the two brothers Alduino and Giuseppe Botti following the death of Sergio Cumani. Most of the time, I was restricted to walking and trotting on the roads. If the horse I was on was due to canter or gallop, I’d be replaced by a professional work rider.

I already knew this was the life for me and was further encouraged by two memorable experiences at Milan races in 1983 when I was twelve. The first came on one of those special days when my dad took me into the jockeys’ changing room with him and I found myself sitting next to Steve Cauthen—who was known as the Six Million Dollar Kid for his exploits in America before he moved to England in 1979.

Steve had flown over to ride the English raider Drumalis. I was still so short that when I sat beside him on the bench my feet didn’t reach the floor, but I watched spellbound as this world-famous jockey proceeded to put on all sorts of fancy riding equipment. You name it, he wore it. He had leggings and ankle protectors inside his riding boots, specially designed socks, and a whip with feathers on the end. My eyes never left him as he changed into his silks. I was fascinated by every little detail and it was only when he walked out to the paddock that I spotted a pair of red sponge ankle pads.