Culture
AP Photo/David Goldman
It happened about a minute after the bulls were freed from their pen: A man wearing a white T-shirt and khaki shorts ran in the opposite direction, but directly in the path of the stampede. Suddenly, he was knocked to the ground by the first animal, after which six more trampled him. It happened so fast it can only made out on the slow-motion video footage taken by another competitor, but it looks brutal. What’s more, the man lying on the ground has done this willingly, and for fun.
This is the Great Bull Run, a nationally touring opportunity for Americans to do what the Spanish have done since the 17th century in Pamplona at the festival of San Fermin. It’s a take on the running of the Bulls — an event popularized by everyone from Ernest Hemingway in his novel “The Sun Also Rises” to Billy Crystal in “City Slickers.” But it could be seen as a watered-down, “Americanized” version of something steeped in history and tradition; something America seems adept at doing. And who, one might ask, chooses to take part in an event that simply mimics something 5,000 miles away?
The first American Great Bull Run took place at a sports arena outside Richmond, Va., in August and saw eight groups of 500 people attempt to outrun and avoid 20 bulls pelting toward them down a narrow track in the arena. On April 5, the event heads to Dallas, where the organizers promise competitors they can “grab life by the horns.”
The event was the brainchild of Rob Dickens and Brad Scudder, two friends from the U.S. who met in Ireland during a study-abroad program while they were in law school. Scudder founded a 5-kilometer obstacle “mud run” event known as Rugged Maniac and wanted to both nationally expand and broaden the events he offered. Dickens was an attorney on Wall Street and thought joining forces with Scudder would be less stressful — it wasn’t, he discovered. Originally from a rural town in North Carolina, Dickens said he grew up around horses and pined for the outdoors.
The second Great Bull Run, in Atlanta, attracted 3,000 participants — about the same number turned up for the event in Houston in January. But why would all these people pay $40 to take part in something that mimics a much older, more established event 5,000 miles away? And, for Texans in particular, shouldn’t a rich rodeo culture of bull riding and calf roping provide all the bovine-infused adrenalin sport they need?
“Brad and I thought we’d go to Pamplona to run with the bulls last summer,” Dickens said. “But I found out you had to book a year in advance. Flights and hotels alone were going to cost $3,000 each, and for the average person this just isn’t possible. So the more we looked into putting on an event ourselves over here, the more we realized we could.”
As for Texans choosing to take part in the Great Bull Run, Dickens said running with the bulls is a legendary event.
“It’s pretty much one of those bucket-list items that people have,” he said. “And they’re jumping at the chance to come to our events.”
It’s not just the tradition of bull running that Dickens and Scudder have co-opted from the Spanish. A Tomato Royale, a massive tomato fight modeled on the annual La Tomatina festival in the town of Bunol, coincides with the Great Bull Run at each stop.
Walter Little, associate professor of anthropology at the State University of New York and an expert in tourism and popular culture, thinks this idea of co-opting of another culture —in this case, an event from Spain to America — encourages participation in something many people may never get the chance to do.
“Are they truly authentic? Do you really experience it? Probably not,” Little said, “But it’s a form of play and makes a connection to something that has been globalized, so in one way it’s a cool experience. And it could encourage young people to go to Spain and do the real thing which, provided they don’t get hurt, could be a transformative experience.”
The touring bull run fits in with the theories of French sociologist Jean Baudrillard who argued that American society was oriented around making “simulacrum” of other things, Little said.
“In real life, often when experiences become exciting they become dangerous, so a Disney-ish wilderness experience is more exciting than the real thing,” Little added, “but without that danger.”
Bringing simulations of events like the Running of the Bulls to America works on a more practical level, Little said, because Americans get far less vacation time than their European cousins.
“Most people in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Canada have been pretty blessed in that they typically get a month vacation, sometimes more,” he said. “Here in the U.S. even if you get one to two weeks off your boss may say, ‘Don’t go far because I may need you.’ So these opportunities allow U.S. workers to blow off steam and have fun.”
Little said he has the sense that fewer women run with the bulls in Pamplona and suspects that’s the case here in the States, too. Images of The Great Bull Run online imply that it encourages a certain subculture of the American male — being chased by a 1,700-pound bull is clearly popular with jocks, bros and frat boys.
“The tomato festival is different, though,” Little said. “It's more gender neutral.”
Getting pelted with tomatoes, it seems, is the great leveler.
The Great Bull Run company is not the first to bring either bull running or tomato throwing to the States. Another company, Running with the Bulls USA has been putting on events in Nevada since 1998 and Arizona since 2002, and its website lists events in Utah and Texas later this year. And the town of Twin Lakes, Colo., held an annual tomato fight known as the Colorado Texas Tomato War, in which natives of both states squared off with their ripest greenhouse varieties, that started in 1982 and went on hiatus for about 20 years before being revived in 2011.
Dickens, the Great Bull Run co-founder, said while the event is inspired by Pamplona, there are differences.
“Pamplona has narrow, winding streets. We take over racetracks or arenas — it varies from location to location depending on what we can find,” he said. “And it’s all fenced in, of course, and we lay down dirt on the ground. Our event is different; it’s not the same thing, but we are giving people a similar experience.”
But like Pamplona, there’s the inevitable risk that comes with having several dozen 1,700-pound bulls charge toward you. Dickens knows the risk of being injured is exactly why people do it, but he said, “of the 15,000 runners we’ve seen at all our events, so far, there have only been two serious injuries.” One person was hit by the bull, fell to the ground and broke his wrist. The other was the one trampled by several bulls, fracturing his pelvis.
“A couple of others have been transported to the hospital but they were treated and released the same day,” Dickens said. “Two broken bones out of [15,000] is a pretty good injury rate.”
There are also the inevitable animal welfare concerns that shadow any activity like the Great Bull Run. As far as Dickens is concerned, no bulls have been injured at any of his company's events.
“Each bull is worth $10,000 and we wouldn’t make any sense injuring our animals,” he said. “We have vets on site all the time and the bulls are running on dirt or grass — not pavement. We hire a rodeo company to provide the bulls and transport them to each event.”
John Goodwin, director of animal cruelty policy at the Humane Society of the United States told Al Jazeera that while his organization has no problem with animals interacting with people for entertainment if no harm comes to them, “if animals are going to be put in harm’s way and there are alternatives to entertain ourselves, it asks that people choose those alternatives.”
As for the Great Bull Run, Goodwin, who monitored the first event in Virginia for the Humane Society, said, “I thought it should have been called Strolling with the Bulls.
“It was a relatively boring spectacle and kind of humorous. The first pack of bulls stopped when they saw the crowd and it took a guy on horseback to corral them and make them run.”
Goodwin noted that while the Great Bull Run markets the event as a “daredevil, dangerous activity,” it also insists only two people have been injured out of 15,000 competitors.
“They can’t have it both ways,” he said, adding that if they attempt to use more aggressive bulls in the future to add more excitement, the Humane Society would have animal welfare issues with that.
Along with her sister Rosalyn, Joella Hengeveld ran with the bulls in the first heat of the Great Bull Run’s inaugural event in Virginia. The girls got matching tattoos — of bull horns — to mark the occasion.
“I’d competed in the Rugged Maniac 5K,” said Joella, who works as a fitness instructor, “and I got an email about the bull run. My sister said we had to do it, so we drove down from New Jersey to Virginia.
Joella recalled seeing the bulls in the pen on her way onto the quarter-mile track and getting a primer on the rules: “Don’t touch the bulls; don’t entice them; cover your head; if you’re drunk you’ll get kicked out.”
Then, she said, the organizers counted down from 10 and everyone started running.
“They have people in there making sure you’re spread out but it’s up to you if you want to be close to the fences or in the middle,” she said. “You start running. Our plan was that I wouldn’t leave Rosalyn and she wouldn’t leave me — to protect each other. So we were holding hands, screaming, running in mud.”
Joella said the whole thing didn’t last long — maybe a couple of minutes — and the bulls were much faster than the runners.
“Your adrenalin is pumping, and every time a bull runs past you,” she said, “you feel you could be trampled.”
Still, the Cowtown Rodeo is an institution in Joella's home state of New Jersey, so why would she choose the Great Bull Run over trying to compete in something so ingrained in American culture?
“I would love to go bull riding,” she said. “But with bull riding you only have one bull and you don’t have the adrenalin rush from getting chased by more than a dozen bulls.
“With the bull run you’re taking your life in your hands and throwing it at that big-ass bull.”
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