Though inline speed skater Kenna Pfeiffer did ride horses as a little girl, there aren’t athletic roots in her family. Her folks actually joke that her skating career resulted from poor parenting.

“They used to drop me off at the indoor skating rink all weekend, so it was like having a $20-an-hour babysitter,” says the Timonium native. “I’ve been in love with this since I started.”

Introduced to inline skating in her driveway at age 8 by a friend, the sport began as a “fun thing.” It remained so even when, on a dare, she joined Fast Forward Racing, a local club with worldly reach. Her involvement, and success, have blossomed ever since.

Fast Forward, which calls the indoor track at Turner’s Skate Palace in Hagerstown home, is where both Pfeiffer, 18, and Piper Leazier, 15, honed their skills.

This month, both became members of the U.S. National Team that will compete in the World Games in Vicenza, Italy Aug. 26 to Sept. 3. The two distance specialists qualified Aug. 9 after a weeklong tryout at the Brian Piccolo Sports Park & Velodrome in Cooper City, Florida. Pfeiffer is a senior team qualifier, and Leazier, the daughter of Fast Forward’s co-founder, Patty Leazier (whose family recently relocated to Florida), matched the feat in the junior division.

Pfeiffer, a graduate this spring from St. Paul’s School for Girls, made the junior team as a national champion last August, and competed in October 2022 at the World Games in Buenos Aires, Argentina. As a sprinter specialist, she placed 25th in the one-lap race and 26th in the 100-meter drag in her first international exposure.

Now, as a distance skater, she’s racing in events up to 15 kilometers that better suit her lanky 5-foot-9 body. She became a sprinter last year because it reduced wear and tear on her leg injuries, the result of an exercise-induced musculoskeletal condition called exertional compartment syndrome. She could live with the pain, but not race with it. And since she’s living to race, she endured three elective surgeries the past three years on an ankle and both shins, including one six-month recovery prolonged by an infection.

“It took me back further, but after that it really motivated me to make the team again this year,” Pfeiffer says. “I really wanted to show everyone. I had those surgeries so I could continue to compete.”

For her, progress beyond Fast Forward included hiring a new coach, three-time World Champion Jorge Andres Botero—a native of Colombia, South America—in February. She’s been training with him in Colombia on a parabolic bank track, as well as in Florida, where she’ll attend Seminole State College in the fall.

The U.S. was the world’s best team in the 1990s and early 2000s, but Colombia’s team has since become the sport’s epicenter. Its dominance makes a financial investment in a U.S. Olympic Team futile, so without U.S. Olympic Committee support, inline skating here is self-funded and expensive.

Fast Forward is helping to change that. Over the years, 10-plus local skaters have competed internationally. “It helps us as coaches to know that our program is working,” says Hagerstown’s Kelsey Rogers, a 11-year Team USA member who recently replaced Patty Leazier as the co-ed club’s head coach.

Almost 25 years ago, Fast Forward began when Patty partnered with Michael Hellman, her best friend at North High in Hagerstown and Rogers’ father. Rogers’ fraternal twin sister, Kirsten Becraft, also competed at an elite level until a knee injury. In 2014, both qualified for the World Games. Kirsten, who now competes in roller derby and coaches Fast Forward’s beginner’s class, made the senior team. Rogers remained a junior.

In qualifying for 11 straight World Games, Rogers accumulated 50-plus national medals. She won a world medal in a 2015 relay and a bronze medal in an individual 10K elimination race at the 2019 Pan American Games. “Now, I’m trying to bring that to the table to help our littles,” she says.

At 27, Rogers has competed since age 4, but is taking a break to focus on coaching and to sift through training programs that might help prolong her racing career. She tore all the ligaments in her right knee at the 2021 World Games.

She counts 20-plus mostly young skaters at team practices, including another with long-term potential, Sharpsburg’s 11-year-old McKenna Luther, already a national champion many times over. Skaters have to be 15 to compete for a spot on the Junior National Team. Still, establishing the sport’s identity remains an uphill climb.

“We keep trying to get the sport out there,” Rogers says. “We’re always trying to produce up-and-comers, but when I talk to people about my sport, they say, ‘Ice?’ ‘No. It’s the one with rollerblades,’ I have to explain.”

In American steeplechase horse racing, the timber jumping season may be shorter than the more natural hurdle season that follows each spring and summer, but the obstacles are not. For one, traversing the Maryland Hunt Cup’s four miles of 22 stout hardwood fences—which reach as high as 4-foot-9 inches—is no small task.

Conquering the course in a record 8 minutes, 15 seconds in last spring’s historic 125th running of America’s most famous equestrian jump race is now Teddy Davies’ unique legacy. Repeating as champion, again atop thoroughbred Vintage Vinnie, will be his quest when one of the world’s toughest steeplechase events—and the sport’s Super Bowl in this country—returns April 29 to Worthington Farms in Glyndon.

Entwined with foxhunting, the Hunt Cup, which was first held on May 26, 1894, originated as a contest between two Maryland hunt clubs, Elkridge and Green Spring. Curious over who might have the best horse, members initiated the now long-standing challenge among skilled amateurs. The purse has grown to $100,000.

“At first, it didn’t feel like anything when I won [last year,]” Davies says. “It didn’t feel real. I had no emotions, really. Then, a couple months later, one day, alone, I thought, ‘Damn.’ And I thought if I won it again I’d be more excited because I had a better understanding of how badly I wanted to feel that rush again.”

It’s a thrill his family knows well. Davies—the athletic, brown-haired, 140-pound Boys Latin School alum who turned 19 in February—holds a proud pedigree. His father, Joe, won the Hunt Cup three times as a rider in 1998, 2000, and 2005. In 2011, his mother, Blythe Miller Davies, was the Cup’s winning jockey. From Dunmore Farm, the family’s timber racing operation in Monkton, the Davies have trained the last six consecutive Hunt Cup champions, an unprecedented accomplishment.

“It’s unheard of,” says White Hall’s Liz McKnight, the race’s co-chairman who won the Cup in 1986, as did her husband, H. Turney McKnight, in 1982. “And [a record-pace] eight minutes [the last two years for Vintage Vinnie] isn’t the norm. It’s crazy unreal. He’s not a normal horse.”

The Davies’ success also isn’t typical. “Riding is hereditary—it’s certainly hereditary in our family,” says Blythe, the first woman to top the National Steeplechase Association (NSA) rider chart while winning more than 300 of her 1,000 races on the flat and over fences between 1978 and 2002. “We’ve been fortunate, and it’s wonderful we can share it.”

As a jockey, Joe won more than 100 of his 500 races from 1979 to 2005, which included 13 Hunt Cup starts. “It’s a real family operation,” he agrees.

Blythe’s father, Teddy’s pop-pop, R. Bruce Miller, a legendary trainer for 60 years, produced 3,700 starters, more than 560 winners and in excess of $10 million in earnings. He made his mark most notably with Hall of Fame horse Lonesome Glory, a five-time Eclipse Award winner in the 1990s. Teddy’s grandma, Joe’s mom, was a longtime hunt master, as was Bruce. One of Teddy’s great-grandfathers was a lifelong huntsman, and another owned Laurel Racecourse and created the historic Washington, D.C. Invitational, the world’s first international stakes race.

Teddy, who began racing at 16, takes it in stride: “Riding horses is one thing you might say we have some pride and joy in,” he says.

Vintage Vinnie, a sturdy, speedy black thoroughbred, has been the Cup’s winning and record-setting horse the last two years—with Irish jockey Dan Nevin in 2021. Lightning could strike twice for Teddy, though it’s unusual for a horse to repeat twice, let alone a third time. Last year, Teddy tamed Vintage Vinnie’s kamikaze instincts in a near-flawless, clean ride.

“A front runner, he doesn’t settle, but he settled with Teddy,” McKnight says. “He seemed happier and more content. There was no struggle of pace, which is why he jumped so well for Teddy. But that horse is a fluke. I’d say he has a good chance again.”

Owned by Perry Bolton of Lutherville and Ben Griswold IV of Butler— collectively Armata Stables—if Vintage Vinnie threepeats, as per tradition, the pair will earn permanent possession of the Hunt Cup trophy, known as the Challenge Cup. The last of nine horses to win three Hunt Cups and retire the trophy, timber racing’s crown jewel, was Senior Senator (2016, 2018, 2019) owned by Potomac’s Irvin L Crawford II. No horse has ever won four times.

The Hunt Cup-focused Teddy and Vinnie will ride in My Lady’s Manor Steeplechase April 15 in Monkton, skip the Grand National April 22 in Butler, and then take on the Hunt Cup. “Our little Triple Crown,” McKnight says of the trio of early NSA races in Maryland. 

One thing’s certain: Teddy now gets the first nod to ride Vinnie. “I have first call on him now,” he says. “We’re hoping for the best. He looks good. Dad’s doing a good job.”

J.F. Pirro is a freelance writer for Baltimore. For 40-plus years, he’s written in nearly every journalistic genre. He’s been published in 75-plus national and regional magazines, as well as dozens of daily and weekly alternative city newspapers.