Spain: Pamplona’s Running of the Bulls – An Eye-Witness Account

ByMary Anne Potts
July 09, 2010
7 min read

By Tetsuhiko Endo

To a man of spirit, cowardice and disaster coming together are far more
bitter than death striking him unperceived at a time when he is full of
courage and animated by the general hope.

–Pericles, Funeral Oration to
the Athenian People during the Peloponnesian War

It’s six a.m. in Pamplona, the sky is turning from navy to pale blue with the
approaching dawn, and the streets are already packed. In reality, many
of the people who line the cobbled lanes of the old town have not been
to bed yet. They’ve spent all night in the bars, clubs, and culinary
societies of this ancient Roman city celebrating one of the patron
saints of the region of Navarra, San Fermín.

Every year, roughly a million people flock to Iruña, as Pamplona is called
in the native Basque language, for the festival of San Fermín, or Sanfermines.
They join the native Navarros in an epic bacchanal that has taken
place annually since 1591. The party kicked off yesterday at noon with
the echoing explosion of a rocket and will continue, almost
uninterrupted, for eight days and nights.

Almost.


Around seven o’clock every morning, a pregnant calm sweeps through the
city as municipal workers set up thick wooden fences along a well
trodden path that runs a half mile (850 meters) from holding pends in
the northern part of the old town to the bull ring. Over the next hour,
young men dressed like 99 percent of the people in the city
this week–white pants, white shirt, red neckerchief, and red sash
around the waist–gather in the street where, at eight o’clock sharp,
they will run for their lives in front of six angry bulls. This is the encierro,
the running of the bulls, which has been taking place since the 17th century, and remains one of the most thrilling spectacles in
modern sport.

As
the crowd gathers, I find myself standing beside Juan Jose Iturmende, a 65-year-old Navarro, born and bred in Pamplona but currently
living in France. He returns every year to enjoy the festival. The men
gathering at the start of the run, on the hill of Santo Domingo, are
mostly younger than him, the majority between 20 to 40 years old.
They each carry a copy of the local paper, the Diaro de Navarra, as a
matter of tradition and as a last resort, explains Iturmende. “They
fold it like an accordion and toss it behind them to distract the bull
if they think they might get gored. It probably doesn’t do much good,
but it’s a mental thing.”

Iturmende
used to run, he says, but now he is too old, has one bad Achilles
tendon, and no longer has the mindset to be able to do it. “Once you
stop,” he says, with a certain wistfulness “it’s difficult to go back.”

He
points out the older runners as they go by and greets them with hearty
waves. They are men in their 50s and 60s, fitter and trimmer
than most of the young Americans, Australians, and Englishmen that pack
the streets. They stand tall and saunter toward the starting line,
noticably relaxed beside the skittish youngsters. Many of them run
every morning of the festival and have done so every year since they
were teenagers.

“Why
do they keep running?” I ask.

“I
don’t know. Either you have it in here,” he says, pointing to his
heart, “Or you don’t. Eighty percent of the guys on the street are
irrelevant. They don’t feel it, they don’t live it. Most of them don’t
even run in front of the bulls, they just stand to the side and watch
the bulls pass.”

The
men gather below the small statue of San Fermín set into a recess of
the stone wall that borders one side of the street. At five till eight,
they raise their papers in the air and sing:

A
San Fermín pedimos
por
ser nuestro Patrón
nos
guíe en en encierro
dándonos
su bendición.

Which means, we
ask San Fermín,
because
he’s our patron saint
to
guide us in the encierro
giving
us his blessing.

Iturmende
sings with them and as parts of the group break off to take up
positions further down the street, he shouts encouragement. “Come on
boys! Don’t get nervous now!”

The
men sing their song two more times, then the clock strikes eight,
another rocket explodes in the sky and Pamplona is quiet, except for the
sound of approaching hooves. The bulls appear at the bottom of the 20 percent sprints down the street
until a bull’s horn tickles the back of their red neckererchief and they
are forced to dive to the side in order to avoid certain goring.

The
bulls pass us in a matter of seconds, rush through the Plaza
Consistorial, and hang a hard right at the Curve of Estafeta where the
street is covered with an anti-slip chemical to keep bulls and runners
from sliding out, as they often did before 2005. From there, it’s an
all out sprint up Estafeta Street, an easy left on the Telephone Curve
and down into the bull ring. Among the hundreds of people in the
street, maybe 30 actually put themselves in front of the bulls.

And
when they do, everyone from children peering through the bottoms of the
wooden fences to the people drinking mimosas in balconies high over
head seem to catch their breaths. Split seconds freeze in time as the
impossibly sharp horns, unrestrained by such things as referees and
penalties look sure to snag their quarry. In these moments, when death
and happiness go hand in hand,* each runner realizes a certain larger
than life glory that, in our age of professional athleticism, is
otherwise unobtainable to the common man or woman. Then they dive to
the cobble stones, or recede back into the crowd and become
indistinguishable from their fellow runners. It is all over in 2 minutes
and 23 seconds, pretty fast as these things go.

When
I turn to Iturmende there are tears rolling down his cheeks. “I want
to be out there,” he says his voice cracking. “I want to be out there
running, but I can’t, I can’t…”

Either
you have it in you or you don’t. And if you did at one time, if you
really had it, but now have lost it, well, that’s a hard thing to let
go.

*ibid,
Thucydides, Pericles’ Funeral Oration

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