On that fateful day, Dettori completed a historic feat of winning every single race on the card – the Magnificent Seven as it has been dubbed – with a combined odds of 25,000/1.

The British public came to know him as Frankie and marked him as one of their own, especially after his exploits at Ascot on Saturday 28 September 1996. Great things were expected of the son of Italian champion jockey Gianfranco Dettori, but the horseman has surpassed every conceivable expectation and rose to become the face of the sport – not just for his talents in the saddle, but for his larger-than-life persona, typified by his trademark flying dismount. In 1985, Lanfranco ‘Frankie’ Dettori arrived on British shores at the age of 14 to work as a stable lad for formidable racehorse trainer Luca Cumani. Instead, over a rip-roaring final few months, the legendary 52-year-old jockey has been at his swashbuckling best winning some of the biggest and toughest races the country has to offer as he brings down the curtain on his marvellous career.

But Dettori, arguably the sport’s greatest ever entertainer, had no intentions of going gently into that good night. So when Frankie Dettori announced his farewell tour in December 2022, one final season to drink in the adulation of the racing crowd before retirement beckoned, it could so easily have turned from a heroic swansong into a funeral march. When the starting gates open, it can feel like you’re grasping onto fate just as tightly as the reins the outcome is never certain, no matter the talent of your equine companion.

Sport is a cruel mistress at the best of times, but jockeys suffer more hardship than most. There are simply too many facets out of your control: the split-second window when an opening appears in a wall of horses, the fickleness of the elements and, indeed, the willpower of a one-tonne animal striding beneath you. Horse racing, as in life, rarely follows the script.

Real life genetic horse game