Victorino Martín
Doyen of Spanish bull breeders whose animals were renowned for their lethal unpredictability
VICTORINO MARTIN, who has died aged 88 at his ranch in the sparse expanses of Extremadura, was the greatest bull breeder in Spain. His animals, shrewd, fierce and unflagging, were immediately recognisable by their behaviour on the sands, and made their owner a millionaire many times over. In a profession full of hereditary landowners, Don Victorino stood out, a short, blunt man with calloused hands and a strong accent, known affectionately as El Paleto – the Yokel.
He won every award and trophy in the business, picking up the most recent, the National Prize for Tauromachy, from the King of Spain two weeks before he died.
To see what made his bulls, the victorinos, so successful, it is necessary to understand their lineage. The Spanish fighting bull is a breed apart, resembling the farmed ox only in the sense that a grey wolf resembles a St Bernard. It descends from the wild aurochs that once roamed Iberia.
A recent study found, astonishingly, that there was more genetic diversity among the different fighting herds than among all the world’s domesticated cattle put together – the result of hundreds of years of intense selection by breeders with different visions of what constitutes ideal comportment in the ring.
Recently, however, one breed, or “caste”, of fighting bull has become dominant: the domecq, founded by the sherry family. Domecqs are popular with leading matadors, because their traits allow for artistry with the cloth. That is to say, they look handsome, charge predictably, and display that simple-hearted bravery that in taurine idiom is known as “nobility”. Around 90 per cent of the bulls that appear in first class rings are now of domecq descent.
Victorino bulls are very different: fickle, cunning and lethal. To put it in simple terms – something taurine critics, who love metaphor, almost never do – victorinos turn very quickly at the end of each charge, hooking at the man and often coming to understand the difference between his solid flesh and the wispy lure he has been using to deceive them.
These characteristics make for a very different kind of bullfight. Instead of the liquid sculpture that a domecq can produce, a victorino communicates hard, gritty danger.
Don Victorino poured his personality into his bulls. Like their owner, they were grizzled, with a charcoal-grey pelt that in fighting bulls is called cárdeno.
Like him, they would not stand for any kind of showing off. Like him, they were of plebeian origin: he bought his first animals from a failed herd that was on its way to the butcher. If the domecq is a dim but courageous knight, the victorino is a crafty and sharp-eyed peasant.
Victorino Martín Andrés was born on March 6 1929 to a line of smallholders in the little town of Galapagar, in the highlands just outside Madrid – coincidentally the birthplace of José Tomás, one of the finest living matadors.
When he was seven years old, his father was murdered in perhaps the worst atrocity of the Spanish Civil War: the 1936 Paracuellos Massacres, when thousands of soldiers, priests and conservative-leaning civilians, interned in Madrid at the outset of the fighting, were loaded into lorries and shot in batches.
Don Victorino had the slight stature common to Spaniards who grew up during those hungry years. He received little formal education, and began working in his uncle’s butcher’s shop before going on to trade in
moruchos – crossbreeds between fighting bulls and domestic cows, which are used in rough village festivals.
It was in 1960 that he purchased, for the rock-bottom price of a million pesetas, 150 head of fighting stock on their way to the butcher’s knife. The bulls were of a caste that was falling out of fashion in Spain, though their distant cousins remain the root stock of most Mexican fighting bulls.
Don Victorino set out to breed animals to please the spectator, not the matador. “The worst cancer in bullfighting is the bull that barely troubles you,” he said. “A brave bull should demand and disturb; it should make you sweat.”
As the domecq monoculture spread,
victorino bulls began to command higher and higher prices. Aficionados will happily talk all day about pedigrees and bloodlines, but
victorinos are unusual in being known even to the most cursory bullfightgoers.
In 1982 they appeared in Madrid at what is often called the bullfight of the century. All three matadors were carried in triumph from the ring. So, in defiance of precedent and etiquette, was Don Victorino himself, the rapturous crowd chanting his name as he was borne shoulder-high in a lap of honour.
The following month, one of his bulls, “Belador”, was spared in Madrid – the only time such a thing has happened in that taurine cathedral, so jealous of its standards.
Over the past four or five seasons, the quality of the victorinos has become more erratic, though one, “Cobradiezmos”, was spared – an extraordinarily rare event – in Seville last year.
Victorino Martín married María García, a daughter of neighbouring dairy farmers, in 1958. The marriage, which produced two children, came to an end after 30 years. He then married María Teresa Cachero, but that union was short-lived.
He is survived by his daughter, Ana Isabel, and his son Victorino, who now has charge of the breeding estate or ganadería, the brand and the name – a name that will be famous as long as the tragic rite of bullfighting survives.