Runners risk life and limb at Pamplona

THOUSANDS of thrill-seekers ran with five fighting bulls in Spain’s best-known fiesta yesterday but all avoided serious injury from the deadly horns of the half-ton beasts.

Fifteen people have been killed in the bull-running fiesta since 1910 and hundreds injured, but yesterday only five people were taken to hospital after the traditional 900-yard sprint and no one was gored.

In 1995, a bull from the same ranch as those running yesterday gored a young American to death in the early morning run.

“I was about five feet away from them, I was really thinking I was going to get it in the back,” Brian Barnes, a 27-year-old engineer from Chicago, said a few minutes after the race.

One man was taken away on a stretcher after a bull hit him in the back with the side of its horn and another, who tripped in front of one, had a narrow escape when the animal simply stepped over him.

Ben Dutzar, a scientist from Seattle, fell on the final narrow stretch.

“It scared the hell out of me. When I fell there were two in front and the rest behind me. So I had to get out of there,” Dutzar said, showing his bleeding knee and scraped hand.

“You’re not even thinking.

“You’re just ... sprinting. The elation at the end of it. You’re just ecstatic,” said a 23-year-old accountant from Adelaide, Australia, Jim Atkinson.

Former Chicago Bulls basketball player Dennis Rodman was less impressed by the centuries-old run, which herds the bulls from their pens to the bullring for fights in the evening.

“I wish I could’ve got closer. Hopefully tomorrow I will,” Rodman, who escaped with a scrape on his arm, said.

Foreigners from all over the world take part in the San Fermin festival made famous by Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” joining regular Spanish runners, five or six fighting bulls and a handful of steers. Nearly everyone dresses in the traditional white with red neckerchiefs and sashes.

Joseph Distler has run every year since 1967, has been gored three times and had a hip replacement because of one of the gorings.

“I woke up at 4 o’clock with cramps in my stomach ... At my age there’s only a few things that bring that: bulls and beautiful women,” the 61-year-old said.