Mike Celizic

He is Helio, and Helios to the Greeks was the sun, the brightest light in the firmament. To the Indy Racing League, no name could be more appropriate for the man who could make open-wheel racing important for more than one day a year.

You must have caught Helio Castroneves’ act when he won the Indy 500 Sunday. He scaled the safety fence separating Indy’s huge grandstands from bits and pieces of smashed race cars to salute the crowd. It’s his Spiderman act, instituted in 2001 when he won America’s most famous race for the first time as a rookie.

But that was no longer a spider clambering up the fence on Sunday. It was the rising sun of auto racing.

Somebody said Castroneves is a man your grandmother could love. It goes without saying that the slim and handsome Brazilian is also a man that your daughter or granddaughter could love.

What makes Castroneves different from other top athletes in niche sports like IRL racing is that grandma may already have fallen in love with him before he joined eight other Indy immortals as a three-time winner of the 500. Two years ago, he became a crossover star when he won “Dancing with the Stars,” causing palpitations in more than a few female hearts along the way.

And now, on the one day of the year when IRL racing commands headlines on the front of the sports section and highlights during the local nightly news, Castroneves has climbed from rising sun to supernova. There will be morning and late-night talk-show appearances, commercial endorsements, stories in the gossip mags. He’s driven into another world with his entire sport hitched to his bumper for the ride.

Dripping milk from the traditional post-Indy’s winner’s quaff, Castroneves broke down sobbing after his win. It was, he said, the happiest May ever. And this wasn’t just about winning a race. It was about getting his life back.

Castroneves had spent the first part of the racing season in the garage, his career on hold and his future in dire jeopardy. The IRS had won an indictment against him, charging the driver and his agent with conspiring to avoid more than $2 million in taxes. He was facing up to six years in federal prison.

Castroneves never whined that he was being unjustly prosecuted. Testimony at the trial suggested his knowledge of how his finances were managed was minimal. A jury decided that he had not defrauded the IRS or anyone else. A final conspiracy charge was thrown out by the judge when the jury deadlocked on it.

He was cleared at the end of April. A month later, he was climbing the fence, slopping milk around the winner’s stand and breaking down into tears. There may be no crying in baseball, but in racing, there wasn’t anyone who held it against him, not after what he’d been through.

The way Castroneves celebrated was far more dramatic than the race itself. Starting on the pole, Castroneves dropped back early, struggled back to the lead, then simply ran away from the pack. For the final 15 or 20 laps, with no slower traffic ahead of him, he had the venerable race track all to himself, his nearest pursuers 200 yards back in his rear-view mirrors and nothing ahead of him but empty asphalt.

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Two cars back was Danica Patrick, who ran the best race of her career. We’ve been saying that was the IRL needs is for the photogenic Patrick to be the first woman to win Indy. But after Sunday, we may find out we were wrong on that.

On Sunday, we got the best of all worlds. Patrick ran a good race and nailed down the best finish she’d ever had at Indy — and the best of any woman. If you tuned in because of her, you had reason to stick around as she worked her way up the grid to third place and ran hard and clean and smart. One mistake or mechanical failure by the two cars ahead of her was all it would have taken for her to win.

But Castroneves wasn’t making any mistakes, not on this day. He was running at the end in clear air in every sense. His name was clear, the track was clear, the future was brighter than ever, not just for Helio Castroneves, but for the IRL, as well.

It wasn’t bad for your grandmother, either.

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