Matador in hospital after horrific goring
Spanish matador Julio Aparicio was recovering in hospital on Saturday after suffering a horrific goring during a bullfight in Madrid.
Spanish bullfighter Julio Aparicio is gored in the throat by his first bull during the San Isidro Fair bullfight at Las Ventas Arena, in Madrid Photo: EFE/Gustavo Cuevas
The half-ton bull caught the torero under his chin after he lost his footing and stumbled while executing a pass with his red cape at the Spanish capital's packed bullring.
The horn of the animal tore into the bullfighter's throat and emerged through his mouth in a dramatic goring on Friday evening that had the crowd screaming in horror.
The pink-stockinged, sequined matador was lifted into the air and then dropped to the sand. The bull backed away after it was distracted by fellow matadors who dashed to the rescue.
The 41-year-old struggled to his feet, staggered a few yards, spluttering blood and was then carried from the ring and into the medical ward at the Las Ventas arena.
He later underwent six hours of surgery at the October 12 hospital in Madrid where doctors performed an emergency tracheotomy and worked to reconstruct his throat, jaw, tongue and roof of the mouth.
"He remains in the intensive care unit of the hospital, has regained consciousness and his vital signs are stable," reported a spokesman from the hospital.
"There were no surgical complications" said the bullfighter's father, also called Julio Aparicio.
"It was a serious goring. Almost his entire mouth was destroyed. It's too early to talk of recovery, we must wait and see."
There were fears for his life in the first anxious hours after the goring.
The injured man comes from a famous bullfighting family - his father is also a matador - and he was one of the big draws at the San Isidro bullfighting festival that takes place each May in Madrid.
The evening bullfights are watched by sell-out crowds at the 25,000 seat Las Ventas bullring and are broadcast live on cable television. Six animals are killed in each bullfight.
Many of Spain's newspapers carried the photograph of the exact moment of the goring, sparking arguments on their message boards. Some viewers thought the image too shocking. Others used it as a chance to call for a ban on bullfighting altogether.
24 comments:
two rump steaks medium rare
....and some pressed tongue, by the sound of it.
You must admit though its a bit of a bugger when they fight back.
These bull things are very uncivilised and have no idea of fair play.
I hope they gave the bull his ears.
Matadors 199,567 Bulls 1, with time to add.
Must be time for some new health and safety measures. Maybe the bold dago fuckpigs could just stab the bulls repeatedly through the bars of a cage, or let it into the ring, hobbled, or maybe they could just throw them off a roof, like they do witn donkeys. Horrible filthy bastards. I blame that el Cordobes.
All very strange Catholic madness. I blame the Popenfuhrer.
Yes, him, too. Bastard.
" mongoose said...
All very strange Catholic madness. I blame the Popenfuhrer."
Why not put the Popenfuhrer in the ring.
He will not be a stranger to rings.
A Good Catholic Boy myself, Dennis, I have kissed a Bishop's ring in my time. I am these days more inclined to throw the bastards off roofs.
I know off topic but you might like to know that Helen Newlove widow of Gary is boarding the gravy train soon as a Tory life peer. Someone else making a very nice living out of the death of a family member. Pity they don't have bullfighting in Warrington perhaps she could do a turn there on a Saturday afternoon.
I wish him a speedy recovery. Anyone who disagrees can always play a risky X-box game, and buy a bloodless, pain-free McDonalds.
Good for you, but the fact, mr richard, that this event is so isolated, so very newsworthy, gives the lie, I feel, to any notions of bravery, This is just routine slaughter. My own view is that this is fetishised, sustained cruelty, abominable, with a superficial, fag elegance that is entirely revolting, disgusting.
I read, some years ago, now, Or I'll Dress You In Mourning, the ghosted autobiography of El Cordobes, the legendary, greatest-ever, Beatle-esque matador who left home to seek fame and fortune in the bullring; it was a spurious, over romaticised piece of tripe, glamourising a filthy, degrading spectacle. I don't argue about people earning a living through violence if they want to but i think the only legitimate such activity is boxing and that Bull "fighting" is a misnomer, it's bull killing, normally, nothing to do with fighting, its audience should go and work in a slaughterhouse.
Popular opinion would be against you on that one, mr anonymous, most would see it as deft on the part of CallHimDave, great PR. I am ever supsicious of those who make a life's work out of personal tragedy and I don't think it helps Mrs Newlove for her to be identified, henceforth, as one widowed by thuggery.
The idea, furthermore, that societal ills will be mended by increasing the price of booze would be laughable were it's proponents not serious.
In a world of unseen slaughterhouses, at least the effete fools are killing beasts in public and - despite what you say - doing so at some risk to themselves. Yes ok, it seems a routine butchery, but only until it suddenly isn't. Not my cup of tea, but there's an element of skill and acceptance of personal risk which offsets the cruelty a little. I don't imagine that a badger baiter would tackle a quarter ton badger, on foot in front of a crowd alert to the slightest sign of fear.
Though it looks as if, Mr Richard, the bull hasn't signed up to the acceptance of his side of the risk.
The horror is not the killing. Anyone who has eaten a steak or set a mousetrap should remain silent about that. The particular vileness is that it is all for the sheer entertainment value of it. For instance, even foxhunting had a pale and dim history as a way of getting rid of potential chicken-eaters. They didn't originally think up all that flummery as a way of getting their jollies ripping foxes apart. Bullfighting is just going out for the afternoon to see animals tortured, and then when they aren't entertaining any more, killed. And then we get another one out and do it again.
Spaniards, eh? Never get out of the goddamned boat.
Many moons ago I went to a bullfight in Portugal. In Portugal they don't kill the bull (at least not in front of you). They do however piss it right off by jabbing those arrow things into its shoulder and neck just like they do in the Spanish bullfight.
But then they get to the good bit.
Half a dozen guys come out - they all line up (not a soccer wall but one behind the other) and this bull charges them like it's a fucking cartoon. Wallop, he picks up one but he's got up a head of steam, wallop, number two, wallop, number three etc... till fuck me with the sheer weight of numbers the bull finally grinds to a halt.
Then the last guy grabs the bull by the tail, puts a bit of a kink in it and gives it a good twist and they all climb off in various stages of disrepair. Those with bust legs or whatever are passed over the fence. Meanwhile the guy is still being dragged around by this fucking bull. He literally has it by the tail. The thing is going fucking mental trying to get at him.
Eventually he lets go and legs it up and out of the arena.
Then they herd the bull out and get another one and repeat the process.
Six fucking times.
Fucking lunatics. Now that's balls of steel. Standing there, puffing your chest out while this fucking thing paws the earth, puts it head down and cracks into you at, I dunno, twenty or thirty miles an hour and you have to hope he doesn't change direction when he picks you up and rams you into the fucking hoardings but rather continues in the same direction allowing your comrades to absorb more and more momentum. Or hope doesn't simply trample on you (which happened reasonably regularly the one time I went).
Absolutely bonkers. You might not revel in sticking flechettes in bulls for the sheer hell of it but to be fair to the Portuguese they give him a fighting chance to put one over on the humans too.
Went back a year or two ago to the same area. Bullring closed down.
Just googled 'Portugese bullfight youtube'. Lots of coverage there of bulls getting their revenge.
Portuguese flying everywhere. Busted legs, chests and ribs all over the shop.
richard said...
"I wish him a speedy recovery. Anyone who disagrees can always play a risky X-box game, and buy a bloodless, pain-free McDonalds."
Yes, Mr Richard, and may I add "or fly around in X-box equipped Apaches, killing defenceless Reuters correspondents and their defenceless and wounded associates."
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Many years ago, I watched a 'Corrida', fascinated by the choreographed and gory spectacle, as I suspect you were, Mr jgm2, in Portugal. I never regret having watched, because it reminds me that, though animals normally have a brutish end to their lives one way or another anyway, either via the instinct of other animals, by microbes or by the hand of humans, there is rather an important difference between those phenomena and the slaughter of humans by other humans.
We can all agree to differ on the extent to which bullfighting, fox hunting etc 'degrade' us, if at all, but I would personally not want to spend too much time and effort arguing that point at the expense of arguing that killing and maiming other humans, and especially human children, degrades absolutely all those who collude or perpetrate such acts.
I realise the two positions are not mutually exclusive, but maybe they are matters of proportion. When, for example, the fox hunting debates in our Mother of all Parliaments took up something like 300 hours, it contrasts with the disgracefully inept paucity of debate by the Honourable Members (with a few exceptions) over the Invasion of Iraq, wherein countless men, women and children have been killed and maimed.
I have seen a dead bull, killed, as you infer Mr Richard, by a skilled Matador, and I have seen pictures of dead children killed by a skilled Aviator.
Which one should not sleep peacefully with his conscience?
On this occasion, may I be permitted to ask Commenters to chose; if you say "Both, actually", it might be that you are diluting your humanity more than you think you might be concentrating it.
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Thank you, as ever, Mr Ishmael, for provoking and allowing for our varied views.
Anon..
it might be that you are diluting your humanity more than you think you might be concentrating it.
Exactly fucking right. The jackass supporters of the Brownian Imbecility that used to piss me off most of all were those who were going to vote Labour 'because they'd banned fox-hunting'. Iraq war not a problem then pal?
Talk about fucked-up priorities.
The other thing I forgot about these guys standing in front of the bull is that if they 'get it wrong' ie fail to stop the bull properly then they pass the broken matadors over the fence and have another go with the same bull. Might take them three or four goes to get it 'right'. Guys limping and hobbling all over the fucking shop.
Amazing.
Anyway, another time we were in Portugal. A bunch of 20-something couples in a nice villa. So off we go to the supermarket to buy provisions. Fuck me, this steak is cheap. Lets get some of that.
So we get out the barbecue, get a few bottles of wine under our belt and start to BBQ this steak. Then we came to eat it. You might as well be chewing a welders apron.
Im-fucking-penetrable. Not a bit of flavour and like chewing a shoe. Could not cut through it - even when I had my own teeth. In the end we had to feed it to a stray Portuguese dog. And I shit you not - even the half-starved rabid stray could not bite lumps out of the fucking thing.
My dad, when he wanted to convey that somebody was congenitally hard-of-thinking would declare that 'He's as thick as bull's beef'.
He also, if he thought a piece of meat was tough, declare that 'The poor animal must have died of fright'.
Until that day I never truly appreciated what he meant. And yet there we were with a piece of meat that was,in fact, both. A piece of bull's beef from an animal with enough adrenaline in it to power a battleship.
You'd have to bury the fucking thing like the Icelanders do with their sharks and dig it up six months later by which time it might have rotted enough to be chewable.
Un-fucking-real.
I am disappointed that so many visit Portugal. Given that those Portugeezer cops neglected and abandoned little Mahd-lin McCann, left her alone to look after her two younger siblings in a strange house and a strange town, went off to get pissed and then abducted the child and sold her into paedo-slavery, why, it's a wonder we are not at war with them. It's only down to the decency of Gerry and Cilla, two doctors and brilliant parents, that something worse didn't happen, like them being arrested for child neglect. At the very least.
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We have the coarsest, drunkest, most violent young men - and increasingly women - in Europe, we jail more of them than do our neighbours. It may be that the Iberian festivalising of torture and death makes for safer streets, the bloodletting maybe playing some part in stilling the kick-him- in-the-head instinct which so puntuates our Friday night High Streets. Maybe a regular, close-up familiarity with ritualised animal death makes human life more precious. Even if it does, I won't be buying a season ticket.
Mr Anon, even worse than an Apache is a bomber-type UAV. That's an evil contraption, and it's use is shameful.
Quite correct, Mr jgm2. The fuckers have no thoughts in their heads except negative ones, blind even to the consequences of their own policies. But then I despair of the whole fucking lot of them.
The other civilising force, Mr Ishmael, is that anybody giving a mouthful to the Med bobbies gets their civil liberties a good hiding in the back of the van. Just like McCann should have had. The matter might have been done and dusted by sunrise. Coppers may be bastards the world over but they do occasionally have their uses.
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