Deauville Family Camp

Deauville’s horse pedigree goes back to 1864, when the Duke de Morny laid out the racecourse that still anchors the town — a heritage visible everywhere from the grand racecourse to the riding statues on its street corners. In the summer of 2025, Horsopia brought a Chinese family into that world for a two-week custom camp: the elder of two sisters immersed in daily equestrian training, the younger on the tennis courts nearby, with the whole family exploring the town together in the afternoons.

Training moved through progressively harder ground: independent grooming and tacking up, dressage patterns and gait transitions, then a jumping lesson from an Olympic show jumper — “watch the line, not the rail” was enough to carry her cleanly over a metre, new ground for a rider whose real strength was dressage. Bareback work built a feel for rhythm, and Western barrel racing tightened from 40 seconds to 28 over the two weeks. A senior Cadre Noir instructor from Saumur set the pace throughout and taught most of the sessions. The camp closed with an FFE Galop 5 certificate — equivalent to intermediate level 2 in both dressage and jumping under the Chinese Equestrian Association’s system — presented by the French federation’s technical director.

Beyond the arena

The programme reached past the arena, too: a Poney Game team event alongside French children, a first walk along the Normandy beach (“walking wasn’t exciting enough,” the young rider said — next time she’d canter), and a VIP box at the Chantilly four-star show courtesy of France Galop, watching Olympic riders compete at close range. Between sessions, the family took in Mont Saint-Michel at the tide and the chalk cliffs at Étretat, and browsed equestrian books with the mayor’s wife at the Les Franciscaines cultural centre.

It is the shape Horsopia builds toward on every family programme: lessons scheduled around each child’s own interest — riding for one sister, tennis for the other — real instruction from coaches with competition experience, and a bilingual equestrian chaperone throughout, required to hold both a B2-level language certificate and riding ability at or above the student’s own.