Friday column: For Borel, the oval is unbroken

What goes around comes around.

Calvin Borel, 42, has been going around racetracks for 34 years; patience, hard work, respect and love for his sport have gone around with him.

For 31 of those years, Borel toiled uncelebrated — a journeyman jockey who still mucked stalls and worked out horses in the morning as well as racing them in the afternoon.

In 2006, he won the first Grade I stakes race of his life on a 75-1 long shot. Then — given a promising mount for a change — he won that year’s Breeders’ Cup Juvenile on Street Sense.

In 2007, his brilliant ride of the same horse made him a Kentucky Derby winner. He was at the pinnacle of his career — or so it seemed.

Until his amazing ride of 50-1 shot Mine That Bird in this year’s Derby, followed by his victory on Rachel Alexandra in the Preakness. Now, with the Belmont beckoning, Borel is in position to become the first jockey to win the Triple Crown with different horses.

Not bad for a man whose first races were on Louisiana “bush tracks” where, according to ESPN’s Pat Forde, “they used to tie chickens to the tails of some horses to make them to run faster.”

Borel’s story now is well known — his beginning to race at age 8, his dropping out of school at age 12, his tutelage from his older brother Cecil, the many injuries he’s suffered.

The first serious one came early in his career at the less-than-prestigious Evangeline Downs in Lafayette, La., when his horse, Miss Touchdown, clipped heels with another horse and hit a light pole. Borel was left with broken ribs, a punctured lung and a ruptured spleen. He went in and out of a coma.

When he recovered and returned to the track, his brother had a horse waiting for him — Miss Touchdown.

“Can you imagine how scared he was at 16 to get back on the horse you almost died on?” Dale Barras, an old friend, said. “That race made him a rider right there.”

If the Cajun has shown courage in his career, he has also shown humility, a determination to “never, never forget where you come from.” He still helps his brother clean stalls, which makes him a favorite among track hands, and the day after winning the Preakness, he raced — and won — a $7,500 claiming race.

“These are the horses that got me here,” he told The Associated Press.

Borel has seen lean days and dark days. If they ever got him down, they didn’t keep him down. There always was another horse, another race.

“My dad always said that hard work is rewards,” Borel said. “That if you treat people nice and like you want to be treated, everything eventually comes back to you.”

Everything is, indeed, coming back to Calvin Borel. What goes around comes around.

Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.