Dettori’s tears

“I just want to cry,” said Frankie Dettori when buttonholed by an Australian journalist in the immediate aftermath of his narrow defeat in the 2019 Melbourne Cup.

The first reaction from this side of the world was to think “Oh come on Frankie, you’ve ridden 18 – or is it 19?– Group 1 winners this year, and that’s proper Group 1s not some handicap granted Group 1 status because it’s a national icon.”

Imagine if he’d said something like that. They would have chased him all the way to the airport. But Dettori is a clever man as well as one of the greatest-ever riders, and he knows how to please an audience, whether he’s winning – witness the flying dismounts borrowed from one of his heroes Angel Cordero – or losing – witness the cancelled grin and the air of crestfallen regret. Or maybe he really meant it. Like most great champions he is a supreme competitor, and supreme competitors are never satisfied. He’s had a quite massive season, but he wanted more. And he’s addicted to adulation. Who wouldn’t be when you’re able to win it as often as he does? Then there’s the simple psychology of the victor who loves victory and loathes defeat.

Kieren Fallon explained that psychology on TV, just as he’d once explained it to me a couple of years ago when I was working on a book with him before falling out with his backing group and losing the gig. “You learn to hate losing more than you love winning,” Fallon told me then in Dubai. “You’ll go to a meeting and ride three or four winners, then get beaten on one you think you should have won on and spend the whole trip home never thinking about the winners, just that one you left behind.”

Dettori is all about confidence and maybe in Melbourne he thought he’d spotted a flaw in his technique. He has bestrode British racing like a colossus all this year, but still he confessed after winning the first four races at Ascot on that midsummer day when he threatened to repeat his own unrepeatable Magnificent Seven, that he’d kicked too early on what could have been the fifth winner and got himself caught.

Maybe he thought he’d done the same on his beloved Enable when the pair of them were seeking an unheard of third consecutive Arc.

(He hadn’t, of course. She’d just run out of steam on a gluey surface after he’d asked her at just the right time). But here it was again. He’d drawn a blank in the Breeders’ Cup. And did he go for home too early in ‘The Cup’, a race he’s had 17 shots at winning spread over 26 years and allowed himself to get caught by the Danny O’Brien trained Vow And Declare and Craig Williams? Williams by the way would win a Willeam Dafoe lookalike contest if the American actor was famous enough to justify such a competition.

All this, of course, might have gone through Dettori’s head before he’d even heard the stewards had demoted him anyway.

Joseph O’Brien is himself Dettori-like in his extraordinary rise to fame. Apart from being champion jockey in his native Ireland before weight got the better of him, he is already the youngest trainer to have won the Melbourne Cup (Master Of Reality would have made it two at the age of 26), the youngest trainer to have trained two Breeders’ Cup winners (Iridessa gave him his second three days before the Melbourne Cup), and quite possibly the youngest ever to walk up the North Face of the Eiger (without crampons) although he doesn’t like to talk about it.

Dettori’s period in the doldrums four or five years ago made many think the days of glory for racing’s biggest extrovert were never coming back. That’s where the similarity seems to end.

If Joseph ever has even had the slightest sense of self doubt, based perhaps on the fact he had a massive head start as son of the great Aidan, who turned 50 a few weeks ago, he’s never seemed to have to confront it.

Or the Breeders’ Cup Classic, which is no doubt another one Dettori would love to have on his CV after the narrow defeat long ago on Swain when he really did seem briefly to lose his head for a crucial second or two as he charged towards the line.

Do single defeats make much difference though to hugely wealthy champions or to hugely wealthy championships?

They do. For around a decade racing’s most famous horses seem to have been mares, starting with Zenyatta, going on through Black Caviar, Treve, Winx, and now Enable who, wonderfully, will be back with her usual partner next year.

All season long in the US, as much as in Britain, the sport has been looking for a superstar to continue its promotion. In Europe, Enable had it, then, temporarily perhaps, lost it when the last half furlong of the Arc found her frailty, and also perhaps a weakness in her rider’s confidence. Did the exhausting flight across the Pacific Ocean tire him at all? Could any 48-year-old be right at the top of his game after such a gruelling journey?

In the US, they’d have been happy to identify a champion of either sex to grace Santa Anita in the first week of November. After Waldgeist’s achievement, though, no real top-class horse from Europe arrived in California. N EITHER Enable nor her understudy Magical, trained by what we may have to start calling O’Brien Snr, raised a hoof to demand the superstar status that so often defines a Breeders’ Cup winner.

It’s ridiculous to use the word “drab” in any sentence that refers to the 2019 meeting, particularly the Friday when perfect air clarity etched every gully of the San Gabriel mountains.

But racegoers do not come to see scenery, however beautiful. They come to see stars. This year, as the best Europeans failed to turn up, and one by one the main contenders Omaha Beach, Sistercharlie, Midnight Bisou, and even Bricks And Mortar, who only just scraped home in the normally Euro-dominated Turf, failed to insist.

So the Eclipse Awards may be chosen almost by default. Vino Rosso distinguished himself and so did two fillies, Uni and Get Stormy, who drew well clear of their male rivals in the Mile. Two humans too – trainer Peter Miller, who completed an astonishing hat-trick of winners in the Sprint (plus a quinella just to prove it was no fluke) and the Lord of the Lawns, Chad Brown.

If Enable couldn’t make it, wouldn’t her presence at American racing’s annual jamboree have brought the Breeders’ Cup a little closer to the ‘World Championships’ status it craves? Maybe next year. The Breeders’ Cup organisers will be praying the pair of them don’t meet somewhere else first. Racing is all ifs and buts though. They both need to come back just as good as they leave for winter quarters.

Enable’s connections will need to want to send her to America one more time if she’s already won another Arc. Her 49-year-old rider will need to be as full of confidence next year as he has been this. One day Frankie may even win the Classic. One day he might even win “The Cup”.

Her 49-year-old rider will need to be as full of confidence next year as he has been this. One day Frankie may even win the Classic. One day he might even win “The Cup”.