Pick six, perhaps – Dubai Millennium, Daylami, Sakhee, Enable, Stradivarius, Lammtarra – and you leave out many champions and countless household names, and all this untrammelled excelsior of success has come while he has been public property, usually willingly but occasionally unwillingly, the going rate for celebrity in the 21st century.

The names of the great horses he has partnered are legion. There have been 77 victories at Royal Ascot, three British jockeys’ championships and one apprentice title, seven wins from seven rides on one indelible day at Ascot, a record six wins in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, four in the Dubai World Cup, three in the Japan Cup, two in the Derby, and for good measure he also bred a winner of the Queen Mother Champion Chase at the Cheltenham Festival. He has ridden 21 British Classic winners – Piggott’s record is 30 – and 282 G1 winners, which includes 14 at the Breeders’ Cup. He has ridden 3,336 winners in Britain, placing him fifth in the all-time list behind Sir Gordon Richards, Pat Eddery, Lester Piggott and Willie Carson, and hundreds more around the world. Dettori rode his first winner at Turin racecourse in November 1986, and has barely let up the pace ever since. Racing – all sport – is at heart a numbers game, so let’s take the abacus down from the shelf and set the beads whirring. Dettori has been box-office famous, a showman like no other, racing’s laughing, grinning, buoyant cavalier even when – like all the best entertainers – he was dealing with the darkness of his demons. He was born in a well-known city in northern Italy but, in the words of the song, he has always been too sexy for Milan. But no-one else has managed the blend of sheer brilliance on the track and high celebrity off the track that has characterised Dettori’s time among us. There have been many more prolific jockeys, and plenty of riders who have won more major races, and a good many who have been considered his superior.

GB: Never is a small word with big connotations, but perhaps there has never been another jockey quite like Frankie Dettori, 52, who has just announced that he will call time on the most glorious, most lapidary of careers at the end of 2023.

In this brilliant appreciation of an iconic global talent, Steve Dennis charts the ups and downs of a high-profile career Photo: Mark Cranham/įrankie Dettori shocked the racing world by saying he intends to retire after at the end of 2023 after a ‘farewell tour’. Frankie Dettori: racing’s greatest showman is set to bring the curtain down on glorious career in 2023.

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