There may be only one Frankie Dettori but racing can still do more to create the same connection with other jockeys

You have to hand it to those hardy people who turned up at Ascot on Saturday to witness Frankie Dettori’s farewell to British racing. They had to put up with abysmal weather and certainly deserved their moment when Dettori gave them what they had come to see with his victory on King Of Steel in the Champion Stakes.

Make no mistake, the vast majority of the extra 7,000 people who came through the gate on Champions Day were there for one man only. Within racing, the horses are the stars of the show, but the added numbers were not drawn to Ascot by the prospect of seeing Kyprios or Trueshan, Kinross or Paddington. For them, it was all about Dettori.

As British racing now faces up to a future without its leading man, it’s a sobering reality that no-one else in the weighing room could possibly have pulled off a day like Saturday. But if the sight of fans serenading their hero down the straight and into the winner’s enclosure doesn’t inspire the sport to at least try to create similar connections between racing’s participants and the public, then nothing will.