The fifth bull run in Pamplona featured a goring and a handful of minor injuries after a protest by some participants who complained the Spanish festival is in danger of losing its thrills.
Thursday’s run in the San Fermin festival was preceded by a protest by a small number of the “runners” who sat on the street before the bulls were released.
They consider that this year’s runs have lacked the usual excitement because the bulls have largely stayed behind the large steers which quickly guide them through the narrow, twisting streets to Pamplona’s bullring, where the bulls are killed in bullfights later in the day.
An adherent has also been applied for over a decade to the cobblestoned streets which helps prevent the animals from slipping and being separated from the pack.
Reggie Gooden, a 60-year-old native of New York, said that the bull runs have become increasingly faster over the 30 years he has attended the fiesta.
He does not run now due to bad knees, but he says that the speed of the bull runs makes it almost impossible for even the most experienced runners to pull off the feat of sprinting just in front of a bull’s horns for several meters.
“I came in ’89 and ’90, and the runs were over four minutes, now they are over two minutes,” Mr Gooden said. “What they have done protects the bulls, and it also protects the runners, because nobody is going to get out in front of them now… It is just the evolution of bull running.”
The bulls stayed together through most of Thursday’s run, which was the longest of this year’s festival so far at 2 minutes, 49 seconds.
Even so, the Red Cross said a total of seven people needed to be taken to hospitals for treatment, along with another 67 people who were attended to by medics on site.
A regional hospital spokesman said a 27-year-old man from the Spanish city of Valencia was gored in the arm.
The other injuries were from blows received in falls as the crowds of runners tumble out of the way of the much faster bulls during the race along the 930-yard cobbled-street course.
The nine-day San Fermin fiesta that was immortalised by Ernest Hemingway in his novel The Sun Also Rises attracts about 1 million spectators every year. Most come to party late into the night before watching hundreds test their speed and daring against the bulls each morning.
