Miguel Clement Following in His Father’s Footsteps

[Wandering Eyes]

Miguel Clement straddles many divides. Son of Christophe Clement–best known for training 2014 GI Belmont S. and GI Jockey Club Gold Cup winner Tonalist (Tapit) and Gio Ponti (Tale of the Cat), champion turf horse in 2009 and 2010 and champion older male of 2010–he balances his responsibilities as assistant trainer for his father’s stable with his love for his family and unbridled passion for the Thoroughbred.

On a balmy August morning, 27-year-old Clement stands in the center of his father’s Saratoga stableyard, hands planted on his hips. Just a hint of a Gallic burr, inherited from his French-born father, underlies his enthusiastic tones as he murmurs performance stats and directs grooms in rapid-fire Spanish. Nothing escapes his keen, bespectacled gaze, conditioned from birth to evaluate a wide-legged walk or the set of a proud chestnut head. Miguel–fluent in Spanish, English, and French–noted, “It’s great, because communication’s key. You can speak to all your guys.”

Picking his way through the sodden ground, he knows which bay needs a shadow roll and which filly requires leg wraps. That the War Front colt–the one that bucked and rolled in the round pen just out of eye shot–might have a promising chance in a new turf stake. Miguel will break off mid-sentence to examine the stride of a 2-year-old ambling down the shedrow.

“You get labeled and pigeonholed as a turf trainer because when [my father] first came over from Europe, he had a lot of European horses,” he shared. “That was basically his only clientele, because he came without really training, without really spending any time in the States much beforehand–I think he spent one year with Shug McGaughey, like four years before he decided to come back and assistant train–so when he came from Europe, he had six horses, all from Europe, therefore obviously they were all turf horses. I think the turf label has just kind of stuck with us. I guess it’s good to be labeled something than not to be labeled as anything.”

Clement Senior named his son after his own late father. A well-known conditioner who took the 1966 Prix du Jockey Club with Nelcius, Miguel Clement Sr. passed away in 1978, when Christophe was only twelve. His sons followed in his footsteps; Christophe’s brother, Nicolas, numbers 1990 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe victor Suamarez among his most distinguished former trainees. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the second Miguel Clement would follow suit. Though, according to Christophe, “My wife [Valerie] and I, we did everything we could to expose him to other things than racing.”

The Clement bloodline ran true, his dad admitted: “But he got back to racing and that’s the way it is.”

Miguel and his sister, Charlotte, grew up on the backstretch. Christophe recalled of Miguel, “He’s always been at the barn; he’s always been at the races.”

That entailed moving around as his father’s schedule dictated.

“We moved around a lot,” Miguel said. “Wherever the horses were based is where I grew up. So believe it or not, I actually did two schools every year up to high school. I spent September to November in [Garden City] New York and then February to April at a school in Florida and then I went back to my school in New York to finish up the year, so May and June.”

Walking down the shedrow, Miguel pointed out stock the Clements purchased jointly. He gestures towards 5-year-old stakes winner Stormy Victoria (Fr) (Stormy River {Fr}), an attractive gray whom Nicolas and Miguel bought jointly.

“She works on the grass; she’s nice,” said Clement, rattling off her pedigree notes from memory (Nicolas trained her group 1-winning sire, Stormy River). “She’s actually very well-bred, out of a mare by Anabaa.”

Miguel is particularly high on the five-time stakes-winning 3-year-old Therapist. The cleverly-named son of Freud tallied back-to-back victories in New York-bred stakes this summer. And then there’s 2-year-old filly Egyptian Storm, a Pioneerof the Nile half-sister to 2018 Triple Crown winner Justify (Scat Daddy), who is working towards her first start. He and his team nurse a soft spot for world-record setting turf sprinter Disco Partner (Disco Rico), the ham of the Clement shedrow. With his penchant for giving “kisses” and using humans as scratching posts, the gray 5-year-old attracts an audience.

“Everyone thinks we’re a big operation numbers-wise because we’ve won so many, but to be honest we only have eighty,” Clement mused, adding, “[My father’s] dream world is to be just focused only on quality, not quantity. Some other guys…view the training as a numbers game. My dad likes to be really hands on. Therefore, that’s why we tailored the whole program–just two outfits.”

Growing up, Miguel put in plenty of man-hours with his dad.

“In the summers from basically, like, middle school onwards, all the trainers’ sons were pretty much walking hots for their dads,” he said.

He moved on to become his father’s office assistant, which he replicated in 2012 at his uncle Nicolas’s yard at Chantilly.

“I spent a few summers with him, believe it or not,” Clement said. “I never worked for him full time because I thought I saw a lot of Chantilly and I never worked at Newmarket, and I actually liked Newmarket a lot when I was first there–so as a result I wanted to work at Newmarket.”

In 2009, Clement moved to North Carolina to attend Duke University. Despite majoring in economics and completing an internship at a California bank, “for me it was always horse racing,” Miguel said. Working for his father in the summers, Clement also interned at the New York Racing Association.

He graduated college in 2013, then entered Darley’s Flying Start Program.

“I did the Flying Start because it brought me to different aspects of the industry and different countries that I had never witnessed before,” Miguel recalled. “In every country, they train differently, from training regimes to the style that they train, the medication they use, the ideologies–you name it, everything has a different country, different regions.”

In America, he worked with West Point Thoroughbreds. In Australia, he assisted trainer Chris Waller, who taught him about syndication models. Clement noticed the success of partnerships that are able to purchase horses on spec there; a team can buy a horse “without having to work strenuous hours beforehand trying to find a buyer before they’re purchased.” He has adapted this model to the Clement stable, assisting his father in developing more partnerships among his owner base and purchasing horses at the sales.

“I buy it on spec and sell it to our owners,” Clement said. “By the time you finally get a yes, it’s so much time wasted that you sometimes miss the horse.”

In Johannesburg, Miguel worked under leading South African conditioner Mike de Kock. He still marvels at the way de Kock works his horses without shoes, observing, “He pushes you to think about things that you’ve never thought about or things you thought were a guarantee–like training horses with shoes or a riders on their backs.”

After completing Flying Start in 2015, Clement moved to England, where he assisted trainer Hugo Palmer at Newmarket for nearly two years.

In 2016, Palmer’s successes included G2 German One Thousand Guineas winner Hawksmoor (Azamour {Ire}) and G1 English Two Thousand Guineas and G1 St. James’s Palace S. victor Galileo Gold (GB) (Paco Boy {Ire}). He enjoyed working Palmer’s horses over surfaces besides the racetrack, learning about the importance of adapting to accommodate a horse’s individual needs.

The prodigal son returned to work for his father in September 2017. As an assistant trainer, helping to oversee his father’s 80-strong stable, he migrates to Florida in the winter and New York in the summer.

And he’s used to the grueling work regimen, saying, “If you love it and are obsessed by winning results and horse racing, you don’t worry about the hours. Wherever the horses are is where home is. It’s the same circuit I’ve been going through ever since I was a kid.”

When asked about the importance of family in the operation, Christophe said it is special to work alongside his son, who brings a new perspective to their daily operation.

“The fun thing for me is, it’s fun when your son can bring something new to the table, can bring new things that I wasn’t exposed to,” the family patriarch said. “He’s traveled the world for the last five years and it’s great because he’s got new things that I’ve not been able to see. I’ve never been to Australia, to South Africa, to those places, so it’s just nice to bring something new to the table…Training a horse is not a job–it’s like a way of life–and if you can share that passion with a member of your family, I think it’s an amazing luxury.”

Whether or not Charlotte, age 22, will follow her father and brother is undetermined; Miguel noted she is currently working for a consulting firm and loves racing, but isn’t sure in which capacity she’d like to get involved.

“We get to share the same passion with our father, which is great,” Clement said. “We work very well together, so in that sense, I’m very lucky. Sometimes, it has a bit of a taxing role on family life, when you’re also working together, on relationships…You have to reap the benefits twice as much when it goes well and you have to suffer twice as much the consequences when they’re not–and that’s life.”

 

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