BENGALURU: For Amulya Kolar, a Class 11 student, joining horse riding classes has been her best decision in the last couple of months. “I am a student who is very heavily into academics, so something like this is a great extra-curricular activity for me. The pandemic has been really hard with us having to stay indoors for too long. I wasn’t sure about signing up for other sporting activities, but horse riding appears to be safe,” says Kolar, who is learning to be an equestrian at the Bangalore Horse Riding School.
Owner of the place, Navneet Raj, says post the pandemic setting in, there has been an increase in the number of people taking interest in the sport, especially children. “Parents feel children these days need at least one outdoor sport. Since it is a no-contact sport, parents are willing to enroll their kids without worrying about safety in terms of catching an infection,” says Raj, who has been running the place since 2014.
Since it’s a niche sport and an acquired interest, Raj conducts trial classes to familiarise children and parents about what is in store. “We have regular weekend classes which are priced upwards of Rs 7,000. This is for eight classes a month. Along with that, to figure out if the child is comfortable with horses or the sport, we have a half-an-hour trial class priced at Rs 750,” says Raj, adding that they take children above the age of five, but several enquiries for children younger than five have also been coming in.
Take, for instance, Amayra Jayanti, who wanted to be a horse rider from the time she was three. Now five, the young girl trains at Embassy Riding School. “When Amayra was two-and-half, she got excited about horses. So, we took her to get enrolled but she was underaged. We are still not regular but we still try to take her once a month,” says Vasishta Jayanti, Amayra’s father, who is a national-level rider.
“They not only teach the child how to ride a horse, but also teach horsemanship – taking care of a pony, their shoe, and how to bond with them. At this stage, they teach them how to be around horses but as they grow older, they teach different levels of riding,” says Vasishta.
Even as things are slowly coming back to normal and enquiries are high, some riding schools find that these enquiries are yet to turn into admissions. Mahendra Gowda,
owner of Legacy Horse Riding School near Sahakarnagar, says parents are still skeptical about sending their children because of safety concerns. “Right now on an average, we get 10-15 students.. but before the pandemic the number was higher. By now we would have been packed for summer batches,” says Gowda, who owns around 27 horses.