In December, 2022, Lanfranco ‘Frankie’ Dettori MBE announced that the 2023 Flat season would be his last, with his ‘final farewell’ coming at the Breeders’ Cup in Santa Anita, California in early November. However, in June, 2023 – having ridden four winners at Royal Ascot, taking his career total to 81 – he revealed that he would be extending his global farewell tour to include the Melbourne Cup Carnival in Flemington, Melbourne a few days later.
Born in Milan, Italy on December 15, 1970, Dettori was still a month shy of his sixteenth birthday when he rode his first winner, Rif, at Turin on November 16, 1986. Having become apprenticed to compatriot Luca Cumani at Bedford House Stables in Newmarket, he rode his first winner on British soil, Lizzy Hare, at Goodwood on June 8, 1987. The following season, Dettori rode 22 winners from 140 rides and, the one after, 75 winners from 474 rides. He rode the seventy-fifth winner of his career, thereby riding out his remaining 3lb weight allowance, on Versailles Road, trained by Susan Piggott – who had taken over the training licence from he husband, Lester, on his imprisonment for tax fraud in October, 1987 – in a three-runner handicap at Beverley on July 18, 1989.
Dettori may have ridden out his claim in unexceptional circumstances, but was nonetheless crowned champion apprentice at the end of the 1989 season. Reflecting on his riding ability at that stage of his career, Cumani said later, ‘He was only claiming 3lb and that was a fraud really because he was better than that.’ Indeed, Cumani demonstrated his faith in Dettori by making him his stable jockey in 1990, his first season as a fully-fledged professional. Dettori, in turn, returned the compliment, riding 141 winners from 699 rides to finish fourth in the senior jockeys’ championship – behind such luminaries as Pat Eddery, Willie Carsom and Steve Cauthen – and amassing over £1.5 million in prize money.