Bull gores Pamplona survival guide author

Bull gores Pamplona survival guide author
By admin


A huge fighting bull has gored the American author of a survival guide for Spain's famed Pamplona bull-running festival, when it turned its horns on him and other panicked daredevils.

The 600-kilogram bull, named Brevito, lagged behind the pack just before entering the city's bull ring at the end of a rain-slicked bull run in the annual San Fermin festival.

The straggling animal skewered 32-year-old Chicago-based journalist and author Bill Hillman in the right thigh and a 35-year-old Spanish man in the chest on Wednesday, before being guided to the end of the bull-run.

Both men were in serious condition in hospital, but their injuries were not life-threatening, regional health authorities said.

Another three runners were taken to hospital with bruises to the head and legs after they tripped over each other while racing ahead of the six fighting bulls and six steers, the authorities said.

They identified Hillman only by his initials BH, but British journalist Alexander Fiske-Harrison, author of a book on Spanish bullfighting who has fought bulls in the ring, said the victim was his friend Bill Hillman, taking part in the festival for the 10th straight year.

Hillman had undergone surgery "but seemed okay, indeed happy given the amount of pain killers he was on," Fiske-Harrison wrote, explaining that the animal's horn pierced Hillman's right thigh but missed the artery.

Hillman co-authored an e-book titled "Fiesta: How to Survive the Bulls of Pamplona" along with Fiske-Harrison and several other bull running veterans.

Contributors to the book, published last month, included John Hemingway, the grandson of Ernest Hemingway, whose 1926 novel "The Sun Also Rises" made the fiesta famous worldwide.

Emergency services workers erected red sheets around the other goring victim, a Spaniard who took a horn in the chest, as they applied first aid.

Dozens more runners were treated at the scene for scrapes and bruises.

Fifteen people have been killed in the bull-runs since records began in 1911, most recently five years ago when a Spanish man was gored.

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