Frankie Dettori
FRANKIE DETTORI, Flat-racing supremo, is recounting his proudest moment over the phone as we catch up at the end of the Flat season. It happened at his local Pony Club with his daughter Ella. She was competing in a pairs jumping competition but her partner hadn’t turned up.
“I’ll do it for you,” he told her before checking, “What do I have to do?”
Ella explained: “If we jump properly we get points.”
“Whatever,” he remembers thinking vaguely.
He followed his daughter’s instructions, and – surprise – they won the competition. When both of their names were announced over the loudspeaker, the other mothers “went berserk”, he says, “as though I’d taken a meal out of their mouths! It was just a rosette!”
It’s never “just a rosette” of course, and it’s one of the tales in Frankie’s highly entertaining new autobiography, . The anecdote succinctly highlights not just his life as a family man (he met
