Baltimore ? The man is a maestro in traffic.

The hardest part of Calvin Borel’s trip was already behind him, back on the racetrack, when a crowd of well-wishers and hangers-on blocked his filly’s final few steps into the winner’s circle at the Preakness. As security guards waded into the throng on either side shouting instructions, the jockey sat tall in the saddle atop Rachel Alexandra, a bemused smile creasing his lips.

“I don’t need much room,” Borel told the crowd politely, his Cajun accent unmistakable. “Just give me a whisker.”

Two weeks after guiding Mine That Bird along the rail to an improbable come-from-way-back win in the Kentucky Derby, he switched mounts and steered Rachel Alexandra to the front early at Pimlico and dared somebody to catch him. All the second-guessing that followed Borel’s decision — no jockey had ever climbed off the Derby winner to ride another horse in the Preakness — evaporated in less than two minutes.

“I mean, I’m paid to win races,” he said, “and I knew she was going to win. All along I knew she was the best horse to ride.”

The remarkable thing about Borel is that he will ride just about any horse. From where he sits, they’re all good, and they only get better under his tutelage.

As Rachel Alexandra was getting the star treatment and lolling around the stables Thursday at Pimlico, Borel was still at Churchill Downs, hard at work. He rode eight horses that day, winning three and racking up his 900th victory at the Louisville track. But he also was beaten badly aboard a 7-year-old mare purchased last summer for $5,000.

If Borel was going to get a big head, it would have happened long before now, and no later than 2007, when he won his first Derby riding Street Sense. The only complaint about Borel’s work ethic, in fact, came from his older brother, Cecil, a trainer who complained it was getting harder and harder to get Calvin to do his usual chores — mucking stalls, and helping out around the barn.

Small wonder. Borel spent Tuesday flying to Los Angeles to do a guest turn on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.” It was a long way from his birthplace in Catahoula, La., a speck of a town where Borel left school after the eighth grade. What he didn’t leave behind was a work ethic that drove him to ride three horses on the undercard ahead of the Preakness, and an instinct for what each of his mounts want to do.

“Usually, I just let the reins back and she just cruises,” he said about Rachel Alexandra. “I had to reach and pick ’em up about the quarter pole just to support her a little bit, but I think we could have went another round with her. She got so much determination.

“When you look in the filly’s eyes, it’s unbelievable,” he added. “You win.”

When owners Jess Jackson and Harold McCormick bought the filly five days after the Oaks, they had no doubts she could hold her own. They had even fewer doubts about who they wanted steering her through traffic.

“Calvin was the natural rider for this horse,” Jackson said.

The Belmont is still three weeks off, and both the owners and trainer Steve Asmussen were cagey about whether she would run. A win there would complete a personal Triple Crown for Borel. And if her connections ask him whether Rachel Alexandra will have trouble covering the torturous mile-and-a-half distance, they’ll get the same polite answer Borel gave a questioner moments after climbing off his horse.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “No, sir.”