Frankie Dettori Comes To Town!

FRANKIE DETTORI, MBE, three-times champion jockey, who went through the seven-race card  on Champions’ Day at Ascot in 1996 and who has ridden over 500 Group winners is coming to town on Saturday 18 November.

The 46-year-old Italian jockey will be at the Alban Arena in St Albans, Hertfordshire for a Q & A show with interviewer Peter Burrell.  The Milan-born superstar of international racing is undoubtedly Britain’s and indeed the world’s most charismatic jockey and he will be taking part in “An Audience With” type evening at the Alban, one of Hertfordshire’s principal auditoriums.

Dettori has won over 3,000 British races including 17 British Classics (three 2000 Guineas, three 1000 Guineas, four Oaks, two Derbys and five St Legers).  After winning this year’s Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe on the filly Enable, he became the winningmost jockey of the Arc with a record five victories.

Son of the famous Italian jockey, Gianfranco Dettori, who was champion jockey in his native Italy, thirteen times, Frankie started his riding career in the 80s as a teenager, attached to fellow Italian, Luca Cumani, trainer at Newmarket’s Bedford Lodge Stables.  In 1990, he became the first teenager since Lester Piggott to ride 100 winners in a British season.

However, Dettori has had his downs as well as ups.  Nearly killed in a freak plane crash at Newmarket in 2000, he endured a six-month ban from racing in 2012 after failing a drugs test and subsequently lost his position with Godolphin Racing.  However, the ebullient Italian has enjoyed a renaissance during the last two years, winning his second Derby in 2015 on Golden Horn and two Arcs in three years on the same horse and Enable.  If that were not enough, Frankie rode a superb ride on the stable’s Lancelot Du Lac in the Stewards Cup at Glorious Goodwood this year.

If you want to put questions to a jockey who is both a celebrity and truly a legend, then go to the Alban Arena on Saturday.  Please call the Arena on 01727 844488 for tickets.