PAMPLONA (AP) – One person was gored and several people had very close shaves in the sixth running of the bulls at Pamplona’s San Fermín Festival yesterday.
Spanish Red Cross spokesman José Aldaba told reporters at the end of the run that as well as the goring victim, medics treated four other people for knocks and bruises sustained in falls and pile-ups during the speedy run that lasted just over two minutes.
Aldaba said the person gored suffered an injury to the arm.
One bull charged straight into the back of a young woman, knocking her to the ground before lifting another runner into the air and tossing him, too.
One other runner was dragged along the ground for several metres by a bull whose horn was hooked into the back of his jersey.
In all, four people have been gored in the six runs held so far this year. The other three gorings all occurred on Monday.
In the 8am runs, hundreds of runners, mostly men, dash frantically ahead and alongside six fighting bulls as they charge along an 875-metre route through the cobblestone streets of this northern city. The run finishes at Pamplona’s bullring, where later in the day the bulls are killed by professional bullfighters.
Tens of thousands of visitors come to the Pamplona festival, which was featured in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. The adrenaline rush of the morning bull run is followed by partying throughout the day and night.
Eight people were gored in 2019, the last festival before a two-year hiatus because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sixteen people have died in Pamplona’s bull runs since 1910, with the last death in 2009.
