‘It was scary,’ says Bay Area victim of Pamplona goring
PAMPLONA, Spain — The desire to have a selfie as a souvenir from running with the bulls in Spain turned into a neardeath experience a Bay Area lawyer says he’ll never forget.
A 6ton bull ran over and gored San Francisco resident Jaime Alvarez in the neck during the first run of this year’s San Fermin festival in Pamplona, an event immortalized by writer Ernest Hemingway nearly a century ago.
“The joy and the excitement of being in the bullring quickly turned into a scare, into real fear for my life,” Alvarez, 46, said Monday at a regional hospital where he was recovering from surgery.
Doctors told Alvarez the bull’s horn went deep into his neck and fractured part of a cheekbone. That it didn’t hit the jugular vein or major arteries was described to the injured patient as “beyond miraculous.”
Alvarez, who works as a public defender in Santa Clara County, said he realized how severely he’d been hurt during his encounter with the bull on Sunday morning when he touched his neck and his hand came away covered with blood.
“In the course of a few seconds, a million thoughts came to my mind, and that of dying was definitely one of them,” he said.
Once it appeared certain he would live, the runin brought rebukes from Alvarez’s wife and daughter. The three stopped in Pamplona to check out the famous San Fermin festival while traveling to another city where their son was playing in a soccer tournament.
While his daughter and wife cautioned him against joining the crowd that would race the bulls, Alvarez said the energy in the streets of Pamplona on the festival’s opening day was too strong to resist.
Alvarez says he ran most of the 913yard course ahead of the bulls. But by the time they entered the bullfighting plaza at the end of the run, the pack of animals had caught up with him.
He said he climbed onto a fence for safety and only returned to the arena to shoot a short video when he thought that the danger had passed. He wanted “a 5second video scene to say ‘Here I am, I did it.’”
That’s when the stray bull came at him.
“The impact was unlike anything I’ve ever felt. It was like being hit by a car or a truck,” Alvarez said. “It was scary.”