Frankie Dettori - Frankie - The Autobiography of Frankie Dettori

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.