SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – For a few minutes Wednesday afternoon at Saratoga, Miguel Clement could allow himself to smile and feel good.  Still mourning the passing of his father, Christophe, on May 24 due to cancer, Miguel Clement won his first race as the head trainer of the stable when favored Coach Case won the 10th, a maiden turf race for New York-breds on the opening day of the Belmont Stakes Racing Festival. The win came after three stakes runners – Drake’s Passage (3rd in the Commentator), Bettrthanluckythangood (4th in Kingston), and Silver Skillet (2nd in the Mount Vernon) – lost earlier on the card. Over the weekend, Clement started horses at Woodbine and Laurel.  “Very touched,” Clement said after taking the winner’s circle photo with his family, including his wife Acacia, mother Valerie and sister Charlotte. “It’s been a rough week for the family and for the stable, for the CC tribe. Dad had lot of followers. I just hope to emulate his footsteps.”  :: DRF Belmont Stakes Packages: Save up to 52% on PPs, Clocker Reports, Betting Strategies, and more. Christophe Clement, 59, enjoyed a successful career as a trainer, winning 2,576 races and accumulating $118 million in purse money, the majority of it on the difficult New York circuit. He was diagnosed with cancer a few summers ago and it eventually took his life. Miguel Clement, 34, had been his assistant for the last decade-plus and the transition was being planned for him to take over the stable with the entries of this week even before his father passed.  “I think my husband had felt he would make a transition and eventually balance to become Miguel’s assistant,” Valerie Clement said. “There’s never enough people on your team especially now as a horse trainer. So, it was going to be a gentle transition. We never expected this sudden loss to this very cruel cancer.”  Miguel Clement said when Coach Case crossed the finish line a neck in front of Sir Oscar, the first person he thought about was his mom.  “It’s been tough for her, she sacrificed everything,” Miguel Clement said. “My mom and my sister, they dealt with dad in the sense of the less-than-ideal scenes, between the clinical trials and tests and the bad news and the scans. It’s a part I was not as involved in because I was taking care of the stable more the last several years. My sister is a Harvard graduate, working at McKinsey, she left that to look after dad and search all around the country for a cure. They deserve it more than me to be honest.”  Operating a large stable, Miguel Clement said there is no choice but to try and maintain a business-as-usual approach.   “It was very much one day at a time,” he said. “The horses, we had a plan for, it’s done out months in advance. But there’s a big emptiness in my life, unfortunately. Dad and I were very close personally and professionally. Nevertheless, he wouldn’t want to know otherwise. You just have to keep going forward.”  Valerie Clement said there were many times during the last few months that she felt anger to her husband’s situation.  “He always said to me we can’t be angry because he had such a beautiful life; in that respect we have to honor instead of looking at the sad side of it,” she said. “He had happiness here in America more than he thought was coming and he was very close to his family. Basically, he left a very happy man.”  Seeing his son in the winner’s circle, Christophe Clement certainly would have been happy on this day. :: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.