Enable’s winning team of John Gosden and Frankie Dettori out to make history in the Arc

Yet it is perhaps the taming of legendary jockey Frankie Dettori that is one of the most significant as Enable, a horse for the ages, attempts to win an unprecedented third Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.

The horse’s final run as the six-year-old looks to add to her 2017 and 2018 Arc triumphs, victory will also be the pinnacle of Dettori’s career as he approaches his 50th birthday.

And both Gosden, the current champion trainer, and Lord Teddy Grimthorpe – racing manager to Enable’s owner Prince Khalid Abdullah – have been speaking to The Yorkshire Post about the ‘Frankie factor’.

Gosden recalls – with paternal fondness – “a wildly exuberant” young rider who spent three successful seasons with him before teaming up with Sheikh Mohammed’s Godolphin operation for nearly two decades of dominance.

“That was the young Frankie. He ridden 50 winners on the all-weather one year before the turf season started. He wanted to prove himself. He had this work ethic and wanted to be champion jockey,” said the trainer.

This is a complete contrast with the modern Dettori who, with experience, has changed his outlook and focuses on the major meetings – since returning to the Gosden team.

The trainer remembers it well. His then stable jockey, William Buick, had left in late 2014, ironically to join Godolphin, and Gosden had been at the Remembrance Sunday service in Newmarket supporting his wife, Rachel Hood, who was the town’s mayor at the time.

They’d just left the ceremony, Gosden walking the mandatory five paces behind the mayor, when they began a fortuitous conversation. “My wife said ‘We’d better call Frankie’. I agreed that I would. I spoke to him and said ‘See you on March 1 and don’t tell a soul’. And the rest is history.”

They’ve not looked back. Yet their 2015 Derby and Arc double with Golden Horn will be eclipsed if Enable atones for her agonising defeat at ParisLongchamp 12 months ago.

Gosden says this approach is all about playing to Dettori’s strengths and knowledge of courses. “We talk about a race and have plan A. Quite often after half a furlong the thing changes and we go to plan B – which is a complete blank canvass. Let’s just hope we don’t chase the pace (like last year). I’ll leave it to the jockey,” he added.

Gosden is also keen to highlight the credentials of star stayer Stradivarius – “don’t under-estimate the other horse we run” – as Grimthorpe, who is also chairman of York Racecourse, speaks about his own rapport with Dettori.

He will travel to the French capital for the big race, and then face 14 days in Covid quarantine on his return. “The key to him (Frankie), and where John has been brilliant, is his confidence,” explained Grimthorpe who is rightly proud to be closely involved with another all-time great horse so soon after Frankel.

“He is a jockey who rides his best when he is happy, confident and buzzing. He’s been the best flagbearer of British racing for a coupler of decades as a racing personality outside the racing columns of the papers.”

Yet, while the Dettori and Gosden partnership is truly a ‘special relationship’, Grimthorpe also pays tribute to the jockey’s insight – and his unique rapport with Enable – that has yielded 15 wins and prize money touching £11m.

“He knows horses and the feeling that horses gives him. He is able to give the feedback to John. That is the beauty of the very great jockeys – they are able to assess a horse’s ability, wellbeing and condition. And the good ones invariably always get it spot on.”

This also explains Dettori’s own love affair with Enable. He’s besotted by her. But Grimthorpe says there is only one boss. “She’s a horse with a personality of her own. It was only a couple of weeks ago and Frankie was giving her some Polos – he always does – and she chased him out of her box because even she had had enough of him,” he chortled.

Now not many say that of Frankie Dettori.

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Thank you, James Mitchinson. Editor.