Friendship

It was 1990. Frankie Dettori was still a teenager (just) and it was the season when he first rode 100 winners. He was champion apprentice and racing’s coming man.

Lester Piggott was 54. He had retired in 1985, embarked on a short-lived training career, then endured some troubles with the tax man. On a whim he made a comeback. Twelve days later he won the Breeders’ Cup Mile.

Whatever the well-documented troubles and shyness that afflicted Frankie in the very early part of his riding life, he didn’t lack bravado. Confronted in the weighing room at Goodwood with Lester, a living legend, he showed less than full respect.

In his biography Frankie recalls, ‘I’m in his face telling him he should be in a museum, advising him to get the slippers out because there’s no way he’ll be able to keep up’.

Lester didn’t react.

A few minutes later the field was rounding the home bend. Frankie became aware that the 11 times champion was poised behind and to his left. The next moment he felt excruciating pain. Lester had him by the bojangles and was squeezing hard.

‘That’ll teach you to be cocky, you little ****’

After the race, with the agony subsiding, an indignant Frankie gathered his fellow jockeys to watch a replay. The bit where Lester did it is coming, he said excitedly, pointing at the screen. Just then the field passed briefly out of camera range.

Lester, who wasn’t bothering to watch, had chosen his moment.

Frankie and Lester have been close ever since, proving Oscar Wilde's theory that people only call each other friends after they have called each other a lot of other things first.