Teen fatally gored in chest at Spain bull running event

A MAN has been gored to death during the running of bulls at a festival in Spain.

Ivan Tejero Morales, 19, died instantly after being gored in the chest in the town of Fuentesauco during a pre-dawn bull-run held as part of the town’s annual festival. The death came ahead the famed San Fermin festival in the northern city of Pamplona, which starts today and sees dozens of people injured annually.

Last year’s festival saw the first goring death in nearly 15 years. However, the Pamplona bullfighting festival is in danger of being overshadowed by a crisis in the sport. A proposed regional bullfighting ban combined with grim economic times to send a chill through the national pastime. From today for a week Pamplona comes under the international spotlight with its bullfights preceded by thousands of thrillseekers chased by bulls that invariably end up goring some people on cobblestoned streets en route to bloody deaths in the ring.

But across Spain, the number of bullfights has dropped from about 1,000 in 2008 to a projected 800 or less this year, as local governments that have always subsidised small-town bullfights, or corridas in Spanish, cut budgets because of declining tax revenue.

Coupled with this, the vast north-eastern Catalonia region where more than 10% of Spain’s 46 million people live could wind up without bullfights when provincial politicians vote on a proposed ban later this month although it would not ban other bull spectacles like “correbou” where people chase bulls through the streets. Animal rights activists say the spectacles are blatant forms of animal cruelty. Bullfight defenders insist the tradition is so strong that bans are unthinkable across the rest of Spain.

In Pamplona, the crisis is expected to take a toll on tourism during the festival made famous by Ernest Hemingway’s novel “The Sun Also Rises”.