by Phil Janack

The competitive fires still burned for Andrea Seefeldt Knight when her career as a professional jockey came to an end in the fall of 1994 after 14 years in the irons, many spent doing things no – or at least very few – female rider ever had.

There was the brief thought of a comeback in 2010 after Seefeldt Knight took part in the inaugural Lady Legends for the Cure, an historic pari-mutuel race at her home track of Pimlico Race Course featuring many of the sport’s pioneering women jockeys coming together in the fight against cancer.

A full-time return never materialized – two final mounts came in the 2011 and 2014 Lady Legends, winning the latter in its final year – and Seefeldt Knight found herself approaching 50 with the drive from her days as a professional athlete still very much alive and, as yet, unfulfilled.

It didn’t last long. Seefeldt Knight, now 58, has transitioned from the racetrack to the range and become of the most accomplished sporting clay shooters in the country. Her list of accolades mirrors the success she had riding that took her to some of the sport’s biggest races, including the Preakness Stakes (G1), which is celebrating its 150^th running May 17 at Pimlico.

“When you break a target you get such an adrenaline rush. When you miss a target you get pretty mad and just want to shoot again, and when you hit it you want to shoot again,” Seefeldt Knight said. “It really does fill the void, the competition. Just like racing, you get the same adrenaline.”

Seefeldt Knight was just the second female jockey to ride in the Preakness, nine years after Patty ‘P. J.’ Cooksey broke through in 1985. Almost two decades went by before the next woman, Rosie Napravnik, followed Seefeldt Knight in 2013. There hasn’t been another since Napravnik again in 2014, though Saffie Osborne is named to ride UAE Derby (G2) runner-up Heart of Honor for her father, British-based trainer Jamie Osborne, in this year’s Middle Jewel of the Triple Crown.

“It was 19 years after I rode in it that Rosie rode in it. That’s pretty hard to believe,” Seefeldt Knight said. “When I retired I really thought that women jockeys were going to be dominating in five or 10 years because at that point [Julie] Krone was leading rider everywhere, Diane Nelson did great in New York. There were women all over the country doing really well. At Philadelphia Park we had Mary Alligood, Rochelle Lee, Gwen Jocson. There were women everywhere doing really well. It looks like there’s a good crop of them now. Girls might be coming back.”

Seefeldt Knight’s riding career began in 1981, and she reached single-season highs of 81 wins in 1990 and $1,352,651 in purse earnings in 1993, one of five times she reached seven figures. A winner of 605 races and more than three dozen stakes, she was named Maryland’s Jockey of the Year in 1991 when she became only the third female to ride in the Kentucky Derby (G1) and first to ride in – and still the only to win – the Pennsylvania Derby.

Then working as her own agent, Seefeldt Knight got the call on Forty Something for the Derby when Mark Johnston, a leading rider in Maryland that had just lost his apprentice weight allowance, took off the horse to ride the full card Derby day at Pimlico. She called the trainer, Reggie Vardon, who put her in touch with owner Sam Morrell. After being turned down by their first replacement choice, future Hall of Famer Krone, Seefeldt Knight was booked just 48 hours from post time.

“That’s the only thing I beat her to is riding in the Derby before she did, only because she turned down the horse. Mr. Morrell called me back at like 10 o’clock on Thursday night and said, ‘Pack your bags, you’re going.’ It was just unbelievable feeling,” Seefeldt Knight said.

“It was really fun going around the next day telling people I had to take off their horses because I’m going to the Derby,” she added. “They said, ‘Oh yeah? Have fun down there,’ and I’m like, ‘No, I’m going to the Derby. It never crossed anybody’s mind that I might be riding in the Derby.”

When her turn came at the Preakness, Seefeldt Knight found herself aboard Bob Meyerhoff homebred Looming, trained by Dickie Small. She rode Looming to four straight wins to start his 3-year-old season, three of them stakes capped by the Private Terms at Pimlico. They crossed the wire second by a nose in a three-way photo finish in the Federico Tesio, their Preakness prep, but got disqualified to last for interference.

“The most exciting win I had wasn’t the Pennsylvania Derby, it was Looming in the Private Terms,” Seefeldt Knight said. “[Track announcer] Dave Johnson called him 15 [lengths] out of it at the three-eighths pole and 12 out of it at the eighth pole and he got up and won the race. It was the most thrilling thing. Mr. Meyerhoff in the winner’s circle, that’s the most animated I had seen him. He was more animated than when we won the Pennsylvania Derby.”

Racing as an entry with Concern, who that fall would spring an upset in the Breeders’ Cup Classic (G1) for Meyerhoff and Small, the two stablemates trailed the Preakness field in the early going before Concern made a late run to be third while Looming checked in seventh in the field of 10.

“The Preakness for me was a home game,” Seefeldt Knight said. “I rode all the big days there before. I rode on Preakness day, I rode in the Pimlico Special three times, which is very similar to the Preakness. The jockeys come down the steps, walk across the track with all the cameras, get tacked up in the infield.

“[Looming] was a longshot. He just wasn’t quite that caliber of horse,” she added. “With him and Concern both in the same race, they both had the same racing style, which was to kind of trail the field. When they’re back there by themselves they relax more and they breathe and they just have a bigger kick. We were head-and-head with each other for most of the race, so I think it took a little bit away from both of them. Concern did kick but it wasn’t his big kick because we would have better off in the back kind of by ourselves.”

When her riding career ended Seefeldt Knight, who moved to Maryland from Florida when she was 8, turned to show horses and fox hunting. Being included with the Lady Legends reignited a flame that had been smoldering since retirement.

“I was retired for 16 years,” Seefeldt Knight said. “At that point fox hunting was several times a week, [and] it filled my adrenaline rush and kept me training for something. After the first Lady Legends race in 2010, [trainer] Mike Trombetta put me on a real nice classy horse in an [allowance] race. He came running and finished second.

“After the race, getting fit and training every day and being back at the racetrack it was so much fun I decided I wanted to be a jockey again. I was 48,” she added. “Trombetta said he was going to run the horse back at Monmouth [Park], a couple other people said they’d put me on horses and I really contemplated it. The wiser person in me won out because I’d have to start over, and I’d still have to lose another 10 pounds.”

While the Lady Legends didn’t result in a renewed riding career, it led Seefeldt Knight to find  solace and satisfaction in sporting clays. With the same zeal she approached her jockey career, she turned curiosity into a passion and, in the process, has become not only a decorated world-class shooter but is highly sought after as an instructor.

“I really loved the training and the racing, so I thought, ‘What else could I do?’ I need another sport. I need some other something,” Seefeldt Knight said. “I had shot a little bit the previous year. A bunch of the women I fox hunted with, we’d meet once a week [and] one guy had a trap machine and clay pigeons. I wondered if there were competitions for this and it turns out there are. I got hooked.

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“I got directed to Anthony Matarese. He’s one of the best shooters in the world and he’s an even better teacher. I got lucky. I got lessons from the best. I went full on because I had trained, I know how to train and work toward something. That’s how I got into sporting clays, because of the Lady Legends race. Looking for another addiction,” she added. “It’s the dedication, the training. I know how to train. I researched, I read, I wanted to learn. I read as much as I could about it, I watched all the videos I could find. When I started teaching, I’d audit Anthony’s lessons and when my students had a lesson with him, I’d watch. I just was all into learning. I really like learning things.”

Seefeldt Knight has competed in clay shooting tournaments across the country and around the world, returning from Ireland in 2019 as the ICTSF World English Championship, Lady Silver Medal winner. She is a Master Class shooter, perennial National Sporting Clays Association All-American and five-time Maryland state champion female.

In addition, Seefeldt Knight is a NSCA-certified instructor, with over 2,600 hours of coaching and teaching Clay and Wing Shots. A product of Matarese’s A.I.M. Shooting School, where she is also a shooting team member, she is a resident instructor at First Mine Run, a private club in Baltimore County, and has served on the board at Loch Raven Skeet & Trap where she re-designed and managed the 5 Stand Sporting Clays and still helps set targets on both courses.

“I’m all in,” she said. “As a jockey, I wasn’t at the top. I did pretty darn well but I don’t consider myself at the top. I was average, maybe a little better and the same thing in this game. I’ve had some good days, kind of like winning the Pennsylvania Derby, and I won some events at different places. Now that I’m getting older my eyes are fading and all my old injuries have added up. I shoot a much lighter load than the average person. A lot of guys are shooting an ounce or an ounce and an eighth shells, which is like three to four hundred pellets. I’m shooting seven-eighths of an ounce, which is closer to 100 pellets going down range.”

Seefeldt Knight will be at Pimlico Preakness weekend, meeting old friends and making new ones from the unique perspective as a spectator that truly knows what it takes to succeed.

“The riding part wasn’t hard being tall [because] I folded up on a horse really well. It was the weight. Weight was an issue,” she said. “There have been so many women that have proved that they could [ride]. It’s just hard. It’s really hard. To be a jockey, male or female, it’s a very hard profession.”