One Centre, Two Sites, Three Years
The equestrian training centre opened on 6 June 2021 with a stable block, an arena and a certain amount of doubt. Three years later it has more than fifty horses, two sites, a school team that competition organisers now schedule around, and a waiting list of children who can ride.
The first member was Wang Miaoke, who came to look at the yard with her parents in the summer after Grade 1 and signed up on the spot. Her mother remembers it as luck. “She was not a child who loved sport, and she was a little afraid of animals,” she said. “I was interested in riding myself. What better way to deal with both?”
Miaoke’s first lessons were mostly negotiation: a hand out towards a pony, then withdrawn; a helmet on, then off. Three years later she is a competitor who spends her holidays at the centre’s camps, enters nearly every competition she is eligible for, and rarely comes home without a ribbon. She is in Grade 4.
The second site arrived in 2022, when the Jingbei campus rebuilt its yard into a competition-standard centre: a 60 by 90 metre fibre arena, a 40 by 60 metre warm-up, a large indoor school, and imported teaching and competition horses. The two campuses were then brought under one management, which sounds like an administrative detail and is not. It means a rider in Haidian can train on a bigger surface at Jingbei at the weekend, with the same coaches, the same plan and the same horses.
Liu Mingze and Liu Pengze, sisters in Grade 6 and equestrian majors in the dual-excellence stream, have used that arrangement since it began. They were among the centre’s first students. “I started out interested in horses,” Mingze said. “Now I am interested in riding, which is a different thing.” Her sister puts the change in attitude: “At the beginning I thought it was playing. Then I understood it was a class, and a class means thinking.”
Their class teacher, Liu Qun, describes them as different in temperament and identical in one respect. “They are hard-working and they do not hesitate,” she said. “I think the horses have something to do with it.”
Three years is a short time for a programme and a long time for a child. Zhao Ruoyi, a riding specialist in Haidian’s Grade 5, arrived as a beginner and is now the student the coaches name first when asked who works hardest. Her mother describes three stages: first, simply staying on and daring to jump; second, wanting to win and being miserable when she did not; third, the stage she has reached now, in which losing a class makes her look forward to the next one.
Liu Hangchen and Zhang Xiaotong, the oldest of the first cohort, are now in Grade 10 on the international programme and are the centre’s senior riders. Hangchen rides fast and wants to win, and spent a season knocking the last fence down at exactly the wrong moment. The coaches called her Liu One Pole; she laughed and agreed. Xiaotong came to riding later, in middle school, and rides with unusual calm. She once somersaulted off a slipping horse and got straight back on. “You spend enough time with a horse and you start to resemble it,” she said. “You can feel what it is about to do.”
The first equestrian class has done something the centre never advertised: it has sat at the top of its year group for three years, and found time between training and coursework to publish a book.
What has changed most visibly is the school team’s standing. In its first season it entered competitions as an unknown. Now organisers ask the coaches for their availability before fixing a date.
The centre marked its third birthday the way it marks most things, with horses: a party in the yard, a cake, and a competition to look forward to. On 14-16 June the Jingbei campus hosts the first National Private Schools Equestrian Competition, with teams travelling in from across the country.
Wang Miaoke’s mother, asked what she would wish for the next three years, did not talk about medals. “I hope it keeps growing and keeps producing good children,” she said. “I hope it becomes a standard that other programmes are measured against.”