No false modesty
Robin Oakley
101111 ono, lead singer of U2 and this year's 1/international guest speaker at Labour's conference thanks to his campaigning against Third World poverty, opened with a good line. 'Forgive me if I'm a little nervous,' he said, 'but I'm not used to speaking to audiences of less than 100,000.' What seemed curious was to hear a man keep calling himself a 'rock star'. Most wait for others to use the label. But it was only fact. I guess if Bono is filling in a visa form he puts down 'rock star' just as others list 'bus driver' or 'journalist'. He'll probably still be doing so when he comes to filling in his bus-pass application form.
There's no false modesty either in Frankie Dettori's autobiography Frankie (Collins Willow, £18.99), produced with the help of the polished Jonathan Powell, which tells how a lonely, frightened Italian boy with a hard-driving father was sent to Britain at 14, and, after early struggles, went on to become the first-choice rider for Godolphin, the rider of seven winners in a day at Ascot and the bestknown character in British racing.
Ups and downs are chronicled with honesty and style, including Frankie's police caution for possession of cocaine in his wild days, the furious split with trainer Luca Cumani (later mended) and the plane crash which nearly killed him. All too brief is the section about Dettori's relationship with the horses he rides, where Frankie displays a Bono-like lack of false modesty.
'To get the best out of a horse,' he says, 'you have to become its friend or you will not win. You climb into the saddle and you feel how it walks, how it places its feet and how it looks at you and you must understand. When I sit on a horse I can tell its character within five seconds, its nature, its temperament and best distance, even whether it has got a kick or is one-paced. That is something I was born with.'
Half the horses Frankie rides on the racecourse he has never seen or touched before he climbs aboard, and he reminds us: 'A horse is a ball of energy, but when we go into the stalls he doesn't know if he is going to run five furlongs, a mile, two miles, or even ten miles. Nor is he aware where the winning post is. So it is down to me to make sure we become friends so that he will respond to whatever I ask him ... he has to have that trust in me to slow down or quicken up when I ask. Only then can you control the release of that huge potential energy during a race.' And the bond has to be established in the ten minutes they are together before a race.
Frankie has not always bonded quite so well with some fellow jockeys. He teased Lester Piggott once too often about his age and suffered his revenge in a packed field at Goodwood: 'Halfway round the bend as we turned for home I sensed rather than saw Lester a neck or so behind me. Then he struck like a cobra. I suddenly felt my balls enclosed in a vice-like grip. It was so painful and unexpected it brought tears to my eyes. As the grip tightened I heard a familiar voice mutter: 'That will teach you to be so cheeky . ' Frankie and other jockeys watched the race video afterwards, but could see no evidence of the crime. Piggott had acted on the blind spot where the camera-angle changes. Had the stewards seen it, I wonder how the offence would have been described ...
Now there is a new tension in a season enlivened by the tight battle for the jockeys' championship between Dettori and Kieren Fallon, who has won the title in six of the past seven years. Frankie confesses that Kieren is the one fellow jockey he cannot work out. He cannot gauge how much he has left up his sleeve for the finish, and says that he has lost races to Fallon having thought he could take him when he chose, only for the champion and his mount to find more.
With Frankie going all out for the title for the first time in years, the contrast between the two characters adds spice. The ebullient up-front Dettori, with his flying dismounts, is up against an ice-cool non-conformist who finds it impossible to bare his soul, and who has retreated still further into his shell since he was one of 16 people arrested last month in a police investigation into allegations of race-fixing. Fallon, who has trailed trouble behind him through his racing career like tin cans on a wedding car, must report to the police again on 2 November, in the last week of the season. Lately, he admits, the surrounding clouds have been getting to him. He has had a poor run, which has allowed Dettori to forge ahead and some are wondering if Fallon's confidence has cracked.
That seems unlikely, given the way he rode North Light to victory in the Derby after an earlier bout of troubles with the News of The World. And racing crowds still cheer his winners home as loudly as they do Dettori's successes. In part it is a recognition of Fallon's hard graft to the top, the curl of hair on the back of the neck that
would have irritated the hell out of any sergeant-major, the touch of vulnerability behind the cool stare of the man they call 'The Assassin'. Somehow, for all his lack of communication, he remains a people's champion. I don't care which of them wins. But I do know I am looking forward to the last few weeks of the Flat season in a way I have rarely done before.
Previous page
