Charlotte Clement, Chief Strategy & Transformation Officer for The Jockey Club, speaks at the 74th Round Table Conference on Matters Pertaining To Racing presented by The Jockey Club on Thursday Aug. 6, 2026 in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein)
SARATOGA SPRINGS - On the morning of Aug. 7, Charlotte Clement stood on a stage with her brother Miguel and her mother Valerie as her late father Christophe Clement was inducted into the National Museum of Racing's Hall of Fame. That afternoon, she stood in the winner's circle at Saratoga Race Course after Miguel won the National Museum of Racing Hall of Fame Stakes with Bottas. That evening, she and her family attended the Museum's Ball, in honor of Christophe. The day before, she had given a presentation at The Jockey Club's annual Round Table on Matters Pertaining to Racing, her first as the organization's chief strategy and transformation officer, a job for which she was recruited by Jockey Club chair Everett Dobson. And on Saturday, she'll be back at the races to watch the inaugural Christophe Clement Turf Stakes, formerly the Sword Dancer, a race her father won five times. Especially during weeks like this, in a town like Saratoga Springs, where the focus is riveted on horse racing, it's easy to see Charlotte only as part of the Clement family, only in relation to her relatives. "Somebody recently referred to me as Miguel's sister," she said, sitting outdoors at a downtown Saratoga cafe on a sunny morning. "I expect to be called Christophe's daughter, but ‘Miguel's sister' pretty surprised me." Not that she minds, particularly; she characterizes her relationship with her older brother as "very close, and very competitive." "He pushes me to be better," she said. Both closeness and competition appear to be hallmark Clement characteristics, a combination that, whether training horses or achieving academic success or enacting industry change, is clearly a formula for success. Clement tells a story of a sales agent that said to her father, "Oh, your family's so close. You guys all know what you're all eating for breakfast at any moment." "He was basically trying to mock us," she said. "But my dad was so proud. He said, ‘Yeah, we do.'" Despite that closeness, Charlotte Clement never envisioned making a life in horse racing. She loves the sport, both as a participant and a spectator, but after graduating from Vanderbilt University with a degree in economics, she worked at consulting firm McKinsey & Company, focusing on growth and transformation at companies that were declining or at risk of bankruptcy.
Charlotte Clement, Chief Strategy & Transformation Officer for The Jockey Club, speaks at the 74th Round Table Conference on Matters Pertaining To Racing presented by The Jockey Club on Thursday Aug. 6, 2026 in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein)
"I loved it," she said. She went on to earn a master's from Harvard Business School, but when her father was diagnosed with metastatic uveal melanoma - a rare, aggressive form of eye cancer - she took a break from working, moving from Brooklyn to Saratoga Springs to help care for her father. That care took the form not only of day-to-day support, but also - fully in line with her affinity for enacting change - of turning her prodigious energy and intellect towards finding a treatment for the rare disease. She and three other women - two patients and two patient advocates - met every Monday evening to explore approaches. "We talked about what we could do to push this forward," she said. "The biggest lesson I learned was that there are many rare cancers that can be solved, but they're underfunded or underresearched, and there are arbitrary bottlenecks that slow things down." Their small group became a task force that the Melanoma Research Alliance took on in order to scale it. Their work didn't yield a treatment in time to help Christophe Clement, but the work does continue, the work to find treatments to help those diagnosed with rare cancers. "The United States is very strong in innovation healthcare, and it's also very strong in [finding treatments] for the top six cancers," she said. "But 30% of people will be diagnosed with a rare cancer, and what happens then? It's an experience that I don't wish on anyone. An interview with Charlotte Clement yields almost as many queries as it does answers; it becomes a conversation, with her asking probing questions not simply to turn the tables. She is genuinely interested in the opinions of people who pay attention to racing, "Every other industry has been disrupted, and I recognize that technology is a huge disruption, so we need to figure out the future of horse racing, and packaging our sport in a way that is popular," she said. "How do we future-proof horse racing? That is the mandate, and it's a big mandate, but I'm excited by it, and we definitely need input from everyone on how to do that." Even before she moved to Saratoga, Clement would visit a business class at Skidmore College, teaching a case study that she'd written for Harvard Business School. When she relocated to Saratoga, she pitched an elective on the business of horse racing, focusing on its sustainability and economics. "It was awesome," she said. "The students love sports, they love gambling, and they know nothing about horse racing."
Charlotte Clement, Chief Strategy & Transformation Officer for The Jockey Club, speaks at the 74th Round Table Conference on Matters Pertaining To Racing presented by The Jockey Club on Thursday Aug. 6, 2026 in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein)
Clement's role at The Jockey Club focuses on the same topics that her students studied: the viability, growth, and transformation of an industry sorely in need of all three. "The power of The Jockey Club," she said, "is to really focus on being a service organization for the well-being and the sustainability of the sport. We have to make sure that the whole ecosystem is doing well." Clement has a high-profile job at perhaps the industry's highest-profile organization. It's a job that she didn't apply for, one that she was hand-picked to fill. How, then, does she respond to charges that she's a "nepo baby" who got the job only because of her family's connections. She smiled. "Challenge accepted," she said. "I'm happy to prove them wrong." Subscribe There’s more to Albany with the Times Union. Subscribe today for just 25¢. This article originally published at Charlotte Clement, daughter of Christophe Clement, embracing role in horse racing industry.