My article on the extraordinary fatality rate in the encierros, ‘bull-runs’, and other ‘popular’ taurine events this year, and why we continue to participate in them, is in The Telegraph today (online here.)
A more detailed breakdown of the figures about these “minor festivals” with bulls are in the post by the Deputy Editor on this blog here. A detailed breakdown of the figures about “major festivals”, i.e. what we call ‘bullfights’, including those with novice matadors or from horseback, are on The Last Arena, my bullfighting blog, here. All figures are from Spain’s Ministry of Culture and show that the mundo taurino, the ‘taurine world’ of Spain, is growing once again.
Over the next few days I will be writing my annual thank you letter to the town of Cuéllar to be published in El Norte de Castilla after consulting various aficionados, toreros, runners and breeders of fighting bulls. Some of what I will write about, especially what was discussed at and after my dinner with the matador Manuel Escribano, is online here.
My dangerous summer is over due to my broken ribs, but to those who are still in the streets: suerte.
Fighting bulls from the ranch of Luis Terron are herded by hundreds of horse riders down a slope leading to the town of Cuellar, in the second ‘encierro’ or running-with-the-bulls in this town’s fiesta. Horsemen and women herd the bulls through forests and open fields into the town where runners then test their bravery in a stampede to the bullring on the town’s paved streets. The ‘encierro’ in Cuellar is the oldest in Spain. (Photo: Jim Hollander / EPA)
So the encierros of Cuéllar in Castille and Leon have continued with their usual ancient spirit of wildness although I have had to stop running with the bulls. On Monday afternoon there was an encierro chico, a bull-run for children involving vaquillas, horned two-year old females of the Spanish fighting bull breed. This is the way the next generation of runners and recortadores (see previous post) are trained. However, one of these wily young beasts managed to find a breach in the fences which lines the route that, although too small for a bull to pass through, was just the right size for the vaquilla. So, with a wriggle and a push, she got through the fence and into the bar terrace I was sitting on with some fellow ‘Anglo-Saxon’ runners (technically better described as Celts, being Scottish and Welsh, but that’s not how the Spanish see us.)
After the initial moment of reaction – everyone leaping over walls, chairs and tables upturned – we all seem to have simultaneously realised that this was the very thing all our years of running with bulls had trained us for. So, as the vaca sped down the hill, we pursued it at a flat sprint as women and children darted to either side of the fleeing beast. However, myself and another runner had a collision, I went down with an agonising crunch on the tarmac, and came up with a couple of cracked ribs. I hear the animal made it to the next town where it gored someone twice before it was captured once again.
However, the most frustrating thing of all is that I had planned to ride a horse in the 5km ‘encierro del campo’ spectacular which precedes the bull-run in the streets of the town. (Photographed top.) I had cheekily used my annual thank you letter to the town in the regional newspaper, El Norte de Castilla (online here, in English here) to request a horse to ride in it, and my friend, the great cuellarano sculptor, Dyango Velasco managed to arrange it. However, that is now impossible. Oh well, maybe next year. The irony and the sheer bathos of being gored by a female calf at a bull-run is not lost on me.
The matador Manuel Escribano and Alexander Fiske-Harrison (on heavy meds for his broken ribs) at dinner last night (Photo: Lore Monnig)
Now I must head to the bullfight of Manuel Escribano, who is replacing the badly gored matador Saúl Jiménez Fortes in the plaza de toros this evening (alongside Javier Herrero, a local matador whom I saw last year and mentioned in the above article.) I met Manuel at dinner last night and so have promised to right this corrida up for my bullfighting blog, The Last Arena. I wish him suerte, ‘luck’. He will need it.
So I am out in Cuéllar again at the end of my season of bull-running and what a dark year it has been. Someone was killed just a few days before I went to Pamplona to run – I wrote about it in the preface to the 2015 edition of Fiesta: How To Survive The Bulls Of Pamplona. Despite 16,000 runners, 42 hospitalisations, and 10 gorings, no one died there at least (no one has since the year I first ran in 2009.) However, while I was running bulls in Tafalla and then down the mountain in Falces four people died on other runs in that single weekend.
Now, after running the bulls in San Sebastián de los Reyes, a suburb of Madrid, I have returned here to Cuéllar, in Old Castille, which has the most ancient bull-runs on Earth (they have a letter from a Pope banning priests from participating dated 1215 A.D.) I first came here in 2012 (which I wrote up for the Financial Times) and have been here every year since and even write a thank you letter to the town in the regional newspaper, El Norte de Castilla.
However, for the first time that I know of, indeed the first time anyone can remember, a 66-year-old man was killed at the beginning of the first of the five annual bull-runs (ending Thursday.) I saw that same bull come up the street to me, its horn worryingly red, and I assisted along with tall the other runners and the heroic pastores, ‘herdsman’, in leading it to the plaza de toros where recortadores will dodge it and saltadores will leap over it. However, no matadores will be involved. This bull will not die today. (Like all cattle, fighting bulls or not, it will end up in the food chain one day.)
I will write more in my forthcoming article on this summer for the Telegraph, but meanwhile I must prepare myself for tomorrow’s run (not least as I am recording it for the BBC.) Obviously, my prayers are with his family, but, as for those who seek to use this as an argument against festivals involving bulls, all of us here know the risks. It is, in no small part, why we are here.
P.S. You can see the inheritors of the Minoan bull-leaping tradition in Crete 4,000 years ago at bloodless work in the plaza de toros in my photo from that night below.
Recortador in action (Photo: Alexander Fiske-Harrison)
Saltador in action (Photo: Alexander Fiske-Harrison)
Our editor, who is on holiday, has asked me to step into the breech to do a little roundup on the years events in Pamplona to accompany Joseph S. Furey’s “excellent” article in the Daily Telegraph magazine today. (We suspect he called it excellent because the article says of him, “Alexander Fiske-Harrison… a stone-cold pragmatist with a poet’s heart.”)
The Editor, left, and Dennis Clancey from earlier posts this year, right, speaking to Allen Carney, noted bull-runner and son of Matt Carney, the first English-speaking bull-runner and prime subject of today’s Daily Telegraph article (Photo by Craig MacPherson)
So here, courtesy of our friends at theDiario de Navarra, is the San Fermín news roundup, forgive the pun. (An encierro – the word we translate as ‘bull-run’ – actually translates as ‘enclosure’, ‘corraling’ or… roundup.)
1.4 million people attended the Fiesta that is the feria de San Fermín, an increase of almost 90,000 people on last year (although last year was cold and wet which may explain a lot.) Despite this, the number of recorded complaints to the police were down from 532 to 429.
Despite this increase, which meant that, for example, the number of spectators at the fireworks increased by 14%, the number of runners was down 2.9% to 16,629 overall, 497 less than last year.
The fullest day, Saturday, July 11th saw 2,576 people running, as compared with the fullest day last year, Sunday, July 13th, which had 2,924. According to City Hall, 54% of runners were from outside Spain, of the remainder, 14% were from Navarre, two thirds of them being from Pamplona itself.
This year saw the fastest encierro, which was by the bulls of Don Eduardo and Don Antonio Miura, who covered the 848.6 metres in 2 minutes and 2 seconds, giving them an average speed of 15.56 miles per hour. (It is worth noting that David Rudisha, the holder of the 800m world record – 1 minute 40.9 seconds – averaged 17.73mph. However, he is neither as fast at the beginning nor as slow at the end.)
This year also set another first: on the day there were the most runners in the streets, there were the least bulls in history. A cárdeno oscuro meano – basically ‘dark brown’ – 535kg, 4 year, 10 month old bull called Curioso I (Nº 34.), from the ranch of José Escolar Gil, decided that it didn’t want to run and returned to the corrals alone and had to be later transported by truck.
Despite the fact that there were only ten horns in the street, there were still the most horn wounds of any day – again showing that the people are the issue, not the bulls – with four that day out of the total ten this year, along with 42 other hospitalisations. (Newspapers like the Chicago Tribune should fire which ever staffer writes articles saying there were none.
This still makes it a remarkably clean year which owes a great deal to the courage and skill of the pastores, ‘herdsmen’, who run in their green polo shirt with their long ash canes, and also the efficacy of the police.
Editor’s [pedantic] Note [from his email]: Please remember to say the pastores’ canes are ash. People keep writing that they are willow or bamboo, which is completely wrong. The canes are made from the common ash tree, Fraxinus excelsior, for the historic reason that that is what the lances used before the canes were made from. ‘Ash’ is Old English for spear, just as ‘Fraxinus’ is in Latin, from which they Spanish word for the wood, fresno, derives.
Speaking of police, under the new system of fines, 9 were issued this year: 3 for attempting to film or photograph the encierro from within, 1 for running towards the animals, 2 for citing the bull to charge, 2 for touching the cattle and 1 for blocking the exit of other runners through the barriers.
This brings us on to our concluding point. It should be obvious that the current asinine habit of photographing and filming oneself doing everything from having breakfast to actually dying had to be countered by an increased vigilance by the police within the encierro: people focusing on their phone have added a third entity to their field of focus when their should be only two – Where are the bulls? Where are the other people? – and as a result, things like the below happen. I believe this young American man lost his spleen.
However, it is easy for policing to go too far. On the second day of Pamplona’s encierros this year, a policeman came over to Joe Distler before the bulls were released to give him a fine incurred the day before for standing on the same spot on calle Estafeta, next its corner with calle Mercaderes, as he has for the past few years. He is in sleeveless red in the photo below. As you can also see, he forms no obstruction to other runners nor distraction to the bulls, something which none other than Miguel Reta, the pastor for that section of the encierro, and a breeder of bulls himself, pointed out.
Joe Distler on his corner, July 7th, 2015 (Photo courtest of The Atlantic by Andres Kudacki – AP)
If you don’t know who Joe Distler is, his attachment to and commitment to the encierros of Pamplona are explained by one simple fact. He first came to Pamplona in 1967 after reading Robert Daley’s Swords Of Spain, missed 1968, and then returned to run in 1969, met Matt Carney and began running with him, and didn’t miss another encierro until 2013. There is a big thing in Pamplona about the democratic nature of the run – runners are not toreros, they do not wear gold and lead their team and have their faces on posters, there is no escalafón – leader’s board – of runners nor any remuneration. In one of our editor’s commentaries for NBC’s Esquire Network, on which the running of the bulls is televised in the United States, he spoke half-jokingly off this. (Madrid-born runner David Ubeda had earlier that day been seen adjusting – ‘doffing’ – his trademark cap while running on the horns of a bull.)
However, it is worth pointing out that Joe Distler ran on the horns of the bulls, leading the herd, for practically all of his three and a half hundred or so mornings, usually alongside his friend and mentor Matt Carney, and often with Pamplonicas like Atanasio and Miguel Ángel Eguiluz. A few photos over the years are shown below.
1973 – Pamplona, Spain – Joe Distler (left, checked shirt, looking back at bull) Matt Carney (centre, white shirt, looking back at bull) and the EPA photographer Jim Hollander (right, number 2 T-shirt, looking back at bull.) (Photo: Jim Hollander personal collection)
1972 – Pamplona, Spain – Joe Distler (white panama hat, black suit) and Matt Carney (dark sleeveless shirt, striped trousers) (Photo courtesy of El Bomber)
1986 – Pamplona, Spain – Joe Distler (white jacket) and Miguel Ángel Eguiluz (moustache) (Photo courtesy of Aplausos magazine)
July 14, 2005 – Pamplona, Spain – Joe Distler in sleeveless red (Photo courtesy of Life magazine)
To try to fine a runner of that experience for being a danger in the encierro is… well… one is reminded of the famous case of the then Formula One World Champion, Alain Prost, who was stopped and charged with speeding on a French motorway. Prost had been caught in his Porsche 911 Turbo driving at 230 km/h on roads with a speed limit of 130km/h. The sentencing judge, clearly both a reasonable man and a fan, summed up the trial with the following memorable words:
“I realise M’sieur Prost that at 230 kilometres per hour you are safer than every driver in France at 30, but the law insists I fine you – so I will fine you 10 francs.”
(Which was worth £1 or $1.50 at the time.)
So, despite the chaos they create crossing the border on Bastille Day weekend, perhaps Pamplona has something to learn from the French after all…
Lucy G. Dep. Ed.
P.S. If you want to read a similar ‘Bullfighting Roundup’, go to The Last Arena here.
This morning was the bloodiest so far I this year’s Feria de San Fermín. With five people gored including one American according to Navarran authorities. Our friend Dennis Clancey came close to making it six (and two) as you can see in the photo…
Careful how you run your bulls, running “on the horns” is meant as metaphor.
The Fiesta so far has been one of moments of glory and moments of hilarity, all among old strangers and new friends. The star of the show has been the American bull-runner Dennis Clancey, formerly of 20th Special Forces Group in Iraq, and now one of the presenters of Esquire TV’s coverage of the encierro, the ‘bull-run’, as you can see in the photo below.
Dennis Clancey, centre, on Esquire TV in Pamplona
Dennis was running on the horns of the main herd of the bulls on July 9th down calle Mercaderes when the lone lead bull, which had shot out in front, came crashing to the ground in front of various runners standing on the side including the legendary Joe Distler. However, before anyone else could react, Dennis reached out with his hand and with a click of his fingers summoned the bull to join the rest of the herd and took them all around the curve.
Some were not so lucky, on July 7th, Mike Webster from Gainesville, Florida, photographed below running in previous years, was gored in the chest by a bull from the Jandilla ranch. However, Mike was released from hospital later that day and we’ve seen him recovering in various bars around town, dining out on his story. (Not true, Mike is one of the more dignified and humble runners.)
Mike Webster in striped orange and navy shirt
This weekend is set to be the most dangerous weekend of running, with the French Bastille Day holiday releasing thousands of new runners into the streets. Luckily a runner we haven’t seen so much of in the run this year, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, is present as ever in the press, having published ‘The survivor’s guide to running with the bulls’ in The Local, Spain’s English language newspaper (online here).
He is photographed below with John Hemingway (by Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, another of Ernest’s grandchildren) in Bar Windsor after running on July 7th this year.
Ernest Hemingway’s grandson John talking with Alexander Fiske-Harrison in the Fiesta of Pamplona 2015, taken by Ernest’s granddaughter Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
We took this photo from his blog as apparently where he claims he has fled to France to avoid the French for the weekend.
We leave you below with his contribution to the magazine of the New York City Club Taurino (with thanks to Lore Monig, the club president.)
It’s not often we recommend a book other than the e-Guide Fiesta: How To Survive The Bulls Of Pamplona, but our friend Peter Milligan’s book Bulls Before Breakfast is proving to be a cracking read – witty, well-researched and well-written. It was also nice to see the authorial staff of Fiesta getting their nods, from John Hemingway – Ernest’s grandson – who wrote the foreword, to the following description of the annual, end of feria runners’ breakfast at Casa Paco with Joe Distler, Jim Hollander and Alexander Fiske-Harrison. We enclose the screenshot from the Kindle edition. Given it’s published by St. Martin’s Press, the “mainstream and bestseller” imprint of Macmillan, and that it’s already been in the New York Post, we feel sure it will do well.
P.S. Ari Deutsch is Milligan’s brother.
The Editor
Here is Jim Hollander’s photo of that breakfast. There are, indeed, legends here, especially Julen Madina and Miguel Ángel Eguiluz, who also contributed to Fiesta.)
"Essential reading" The Times, "Best reads" The Telegraph, "Compelling. Lyrical." The Mail, "Thrillng." Financial Times, "Breathtaking” The Herald, “Intoxicating." The Australian, “Deeply felt." The Prague Post, Shortlisted for: William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2011, The 'Bookie' Prize
