Unsung Calvin Borel had the ride of his life as Street Sense rallied to win the Kentucky Derby, validating the unconventional moves of an owner and trainer

	On the track where he won the Juvenile by 10 lengths, Street Sense roared by an overmatched Hard Spun (8). Heinz Kluetmeier/SI

On a warm winter morning at a South Florida thoroughbred training center, Carl Nafzger talked with a visitor while a young colt watched from his stall not 10 feet away. The nation's 2-year-old champion in 2006, Street Sense had not run a race in the new year, and here it was the last day of February. The Kentucky Derby loomed in the distance. "He's a phenomenal horse," said Nafzger, a 65-year-old Texan with a weed-whacker drawl and one Derby victory already on his résumé. "But wherever we're going, it's up to him to take us there. We'll just go along."

Here, then, is a Derby story built on faith. Together three men would follow the horse: the 83-year-old owner, James Tafel, whose instinctive matching of stallion and mare (a mating that experts told him would never produce greatness) begat Street Sense; the trainer, Nafzger, who refused to take the conventional path to Louisville; and the underappreciated jockey, Calvin Borel, who waited nearly all of his 40 years for the chance to sit astride an animal like this one.

They believed in the horse, and they believed in each other, and at 6:18 last Saturday evening, Borel carried Tafel's royal-blue-and-gold racing silks beneath the wire at Churchill Downs, 2 1/4 lengths clear of Hard Spun and eight long lengths ahead of morning-line favorite Curlin, who finished third in his fourth career start. "Greatest moment of your life," Borel would call it after a daring and professional ride.

The third-largest crowd (156,635) in the 133-year history of the Derby saw Street Sense become the first Breeders' Cup Juvenile champion to follow with a victory in the Run for the Roses. Attention turns to the May 19 Preakness and perhaps beyond, to the June 9 Belmont Stakes, as Street Sense, a strapping and dominant dark bay, is next in line to try to end a Triple Crown drought that has reached 28 years, the longest ever.