Dining at the White House while meeting the Queen of England and joking with President Bush, jockey Calvin Borel should have been asked to make a few remarks.
“We the people …” would have been the appropriate start.
The Kentucky Derby winning rider is your neighbor. Your mailman, mechanic or youth coach. An average guy with no pretensions who humbled the Sport of Kings with a royal ride aboard Street Sense.
Another Cajun rider born from thered-hot pace of Louisiana bush tracks who first competed in the no-holds barred match races at age eight and quit school at 13 following a racing accident. Borel joins Kent Desormeaux, Randy Romero, Shane Sellers and Eddie Delahoussaye as backwater jockeys who learned how the raceride in traffic.
Borel and Street Sense are headed for Saturday’s 131st Preakness Stakes at Pimlico. They’ll be the crowd favorites because the jockey is one of the masses. Someone unafraid to muck a stall despite 4,000 career wins. You wouldn’t catch kingpins like Jerry Bailey or Bill Shoemaker touching a pitchfork, but the youngest of six brothers raised on the edge of their daddy’s sugar cane fields has known nothing but hard work. Winning America’s biggest race won’t change him now. Indeed, Borel declined Jay Leno’s offer to come to Hollywood for a late night chat. There were horses to gallop in the morning.
“It’s just another day — that’s how I got there,” said Borel. “That’s one thing about me — I never forget where I come from. You can be at the top today and the bottom tomorrow in this business.”
The top has been pretty good, though. The four greatest days of his life, said Borel of the Derby aftermath that included a sudden invitation to meet Queen Elizabeth, who owns one of her country’s more prominent racing stables.
“I was very tense until I got in and the President gave me a hug,” Borel recalled. “He asked me where I stole my tux from. I told him that I found it out on the side of the road. He introduced me to the Queen and I shook her hand.”
Borel, 40, may not have reached high school, but he knows the shortest geometric path around one mile ovals is the rail. “Bo-rail” justified the nickname when skimming the inside to rally from 19th in the Derby. The path to Preakness victory and a shot at the Triple Crown may come the same way.
“I’ve always laughed and said Calvin’s first five or six options is lookfor the rail,” said Hard Spun trainer Larry Jones. “He don’t even think about going anywhere but the rail until like option eight or nine and so. … There is no one in the game that will ride a rail tighter than Calvin Borel. If you give him room to get one-fourth of his horse in there, he’ll get the whole thing in and go.”
All the way to the winner’s circle.
Rick Snider has covered local sports since 1978. Contact him at [email protected].
See Borel Run in the Local Photo Blog
