Loughnane will be contracted alongside William Buick as one of two retained Godolphin jockeys next year, and not as an outright No 1, but even if Loughnane does not claim the lion’s share of the best rides as soon as next year, his trajectory within the operation seems clear. That, in turn, can only add to the hopes within the sport that Loughnane is a potential successor to Frankie Dettori, Godolphin’s first and most successful No 1 rider, as a “crossover” talent with the charisma to build a public and media profile beyond the confines of the racing bubble. Loughnane has been swatting away comparisons with Dettori, who was a relative veteran when he won his first title at 23, almost since his earliest days as an apprentice.
He is engaging and articulate, has the same showman’s instincts and ability to engage with the crowd, and takes as much obvious pleasure from a big-race winner as the fans cheering him back to the winner’s enclosure. For a racing operation conceived as a soft-power advertisement for Dubai around the globe, it is a combination of prodigious talent in the saddle and an easy likeability out of it that fits the brand ideally. At the same time, though, he is not the next Dettori, he is the first Billy Loughnane, and the racing, sporting and media landscapes have also changed completely since “Frankie” managed to achieve the same first-name status with the wider sporting public that “Lester” enjoyed a generation earlier.
Dettori, after all, not only rode all seven winners on the card at Ascot early on in his career. He was also a familiar face for around eight million BBC viewers each week as a team captain on A Question Of Sport, where the fact that, at the time, he had never won the Derby was a running joke. It was, in effect, a priceless – and free – weekly advertisement for Dettori, racing and the Derby on the national broadcaster, and in the fragmented world of social media and YouTube, such platforms no longer exist.
But there is still potential, perhaps, for Loughnane to be the first racing star of the Tik Tok era, and his new contract with Godolphin should soon enough see him competing aboard runners with a leading chance in all but a handful few of the season’s showpiece events. He has already progressed through the ranks at extraordinary speed since riding his first winner shortly after his 16th birthday. He set the seal on an exceptional season in 2026, which also included his first Classic success on Bow Echo in the 2,000 Guineas in May, by riding his first Breeders’ Cup winner, at Keeneland in Kentucky, five days ago.
He has also been riding for Godolphin since his apprentice days, and notched his first Group One success on their stalwart Rebel’s Romance in Berlin in August 2025. A formal contract with the operation, though, elevates him towards the elite group of riders – including Buick, Ryan Moore, Oisin Murphy and Colin Keane – who can expect to ride Group One winners on a regular basis. Whether it is possible to split those winners between two different riders, or for how long, remains to be seen.
Buick had 32 rides in Group One races in Britain alone in 2026 – only Ryan Moore, with 34, had more – and his six winners started at 5-4, 3-1, 4-9, 9-4, 11-10 and 2-1. Even Godolphin, in other words, is not blessed with such a wealth of top-class horses that the best Group One chances can be easily shared around. But for the moment, this will be of little concern to Loughnane as his whirlwind career continues on an upward curve.
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