By Dick Jerardi
When he announced his own death Sunday in a heartfelt social media post that he had clearly spent much time considering and writing as he battled an incurable cancer, I thought of all those winner’s circle scenes at Parx where one of trainer Christophe Clement’s very best horses kept appearing year after year.
I can’t say with absolute certainty I am right about this, but I feel reasonably certain that Pure Sensation, trained by Clement, has won more money in races at Parx Racing than any horse in the 50-year history of the race track.
Taking over for the Maryland legend Ben’s Cat in the track’s two turf sprint stakes, Pure Sensation won the Turf Monster in 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2019. He won the Parx Dash in 2016, 2017, 2019 and was third in the 2018 Dash. I was surprised to find out that Pure Sensation ran fourth to the wonderful Pennsylvania bred Favorite Tale in the 2014 Gallant Bob. Add up the earnings from those nine races at Parx that resulted in seven wins, a third and a fourth and you get $1,111,000, the only, in my research, horse ever to earn $1 million in races at the track.
Pure Sensation raced 38 times, with 14 wins, 5 seconds, 7 thirds, and earnings of $2,004,050. So the horse, who was inducted into the Park Hall of Fame in 2021, had exactly half of his lifetime wins at Parx.
Parx Hall of Fame jockey Kendrick Carmouche rode Pure Sensation in five of those Parx wins and the Dash third. When I called him Sunday night, he fondly remembered the horse and the man behind the horse.
“It was just an eerie feeling around the race track,” Carmouche said of the afternoon at Aqueduct. “He wasn’t just only a trainer, but we saw him as a family man and a businessman. He was just a joy to be around.”
Carmouche would get emotional in the winner’s circle after those wins at Parx by Pure Sensation. It was a homecoming for him after he had been established as one of the top riders in New York.
“(Pure Sensation) always gave me the best effort every time I went out there to ride him,” the jockey said. “He knew me and I knew him. We just knew what each other wanted at every point of the race. It was amazing to me to be honest with you.”
In his 3 1/2 decades as a trainer in the United States, Clement won 2,576 races, 286 graded stakes and his horses earned $184 million, 11th all time. He won seven Grade I stakes with turf star Gio Ponti and the 2014 Belmont Stakes with Tonalist.
Eight of the trainers ahead of him on the earnings list are already in the Hall of Fame. The other two (Chad Brown, Brad Cox) will be there when eligible. Clement has been on the HOF ballot since 2019, but has yet, for some unknown reason, to receive the required 50 percent plus one vote needed for induction. Hopefully, now that his record is complete and placed in proper context, that oversight will be rectified next year.
When Pure Sensation came to Parx, he was almost always accompanied by Clement’s top assistant, Christophe Lorieul. Clement’s son Miguel will take over the stable in a succession plan long established. And it sounds like Lorieul, always a class act when he spoke about Pure Sensation, will stay with the stable as well.
It had been known around the track for some time that Clement had this awful form of cancer with no cure. It did not make the news any easier to take when his post (and I urge everybody to read it) hit the Internet.
I did not really know Clement, but I knew his work and I know so many people that knew him well. The verdict was unanimous. This was a man who loved life, loved what he did and was a credit to the sport for the start of his career until the end.
I certainly knew about his ability when I made a sizable bet on one of his horses on Oct. 26, 2007 at Monmouth Parx. It was the first year of the two-day Breeders’ Cup. It was an awful, rainy Friday at one of America’s most beautiful tracks which deserved better in its first and still only opportunity to host the Breeders’ Cup.
It was the Juvenile Turf. Clement’s horse was 8-1 and, after what could charitably be called an adventurous trip, finished eighth. When I watched the race live and then watched the replay, I knew for certain this horse was way better than his finish.
That night at dinner, I told some of my writer friends about this 2-year-old who might actually turn out to be pretty good some day. It was Gio Ponti who started 29 times with 12 wins, 10 seconds and 1 third, with earnings of $6.1 million, the most of any Clement horse.
Turned out the best horse that day in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Tur finished eighth. But Clement got over that, took his time and developed Gio Ponti into the best horse he ever trained. And that is how it’s done. And few in this generation of trainers ever did it better than Christophe Clement, gone way too soon at 59.
