Showing posts with label bullruns - usa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bullruns - usa. Show all posts
August 6, 2023
April 10, 2018
"Running with the Bulls" coming to Salt Lake City
(by Josh Furlong ksl.com 8-26-13)
Utahns may soon get a chance to run away from raging bulls in what some consider a sport.
Running With the Bulls USA announced last weekend that they are adding Salt Lake City to their 2014 calendar. Participants will have the opportunity to win over $10,000, while hoping to stave off being gored by a rushing bull. "The Running With the Bulls Festivals have been wildly successful over the years," said Phil Immordino, the event organizer, in a prepared statement. "And this year it's going to be about big bulls, big bucks, and big fun." The exact details about Utah's festival are unknown at this time. However, Deputy Director of Communications for Salt Lake City, Art Raymond, said the festival organizers have not contacted the city about the festival or the feasibility about such an event. Raymond said no permits have been issued, nor have the event organizers begun the permit process.
The Running With the Bulls Festivals will be held in Cave Creek, Arizona in October, in Las Vegas in April and in the Phoenix area in October 2014. Immordino said event organizers are expecting about 15,000 people to participate in the Cave Creek festival.
The success of the past events prompted Running With the Bulls USA to open up Salt Lake City as an additional location for potential participants.
"We have had hundreds of past runners and sponsors asking us to expand our event calendar, so we are excited about adding Salt Lake City, and continuing our role as pioneers in these exciting Running With the Bulls events," Immordino said. Each festival features a weekend-long event, with six races on Saturday and six races on Sunday. In addition to the Running With the Bulls, the festival will include the "Great Bull Battle of the Bands," food, drinks, entertainment and rides. More details about Utah's event will be released at a later date. Tickets for all festivals are sold on the Running With the Bulls USA website.
https://www.ksl.com/?sid=26594721&nid=148
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Sadly, this event never took place.
I kept my eye on it on their website, and they even had a location for it scheduled in Heber around the 24th of July, Utah's "Pioneer Days".
But eventually all the bull runs this group were scheduling were eventually canceled due to the animal rights activists and the lawsuits they were threatening. The organizers decided it just wasn't worth the hassle.
Utahns may soon get a chance to run away from raging bulls in what some consider a sport.
Running With the Bulls USA announced last weekend that they are adding Salt Lake City to their 2014 calendar. Participants will have the opportunity to win over $10,000, while hoping to stave off being gored by a rushing bull. "The Running With the Bulls Festivals have been wildly successful over the years," said Phil Immordino, the event organizer, in a prepared statement. "And this year it's going to be about big bulls, big bucks, and big fun." The exact details about Utah's festival are unknown at this time. However, Deputy Director of Communications for Salt Lake City, Art Raymond, said the festival organizers have not contacted the city about the festival or the feasibility about such an event. Raymond said no permits have been issued, nor have the event organizers begun the permit process.
The Running With the Bulls Festivals will be held in Cave Creek, Arizona in October, in Las Vegas in April and in the Phoenix area in October 2014. Immordino said event organizers are expecting about 15,000 people to participate in the Cave Creek festival.
The success of the past events prompted Running With the Bulls USA to open up Salt Lake City as an additional location for potential participants.
"We have had hundreds of past runners and sponsors asking us to expand our event calendar, so we are excited about adding Salt Lake City, and continuing our role as pioneers in these exciting Running With the Bulls events," Immordino said. Each festival features a weekend-long event, with six races on Saturday and six races on Sunday. In addition to the Running With the Bulls, the festival will include the "Great Bull Battle of the Bands," food, drinks, entertainment and rides. More details about Utah's event will be released at a later date. Tickets for all festivals are sold on the Running With the Bulls USA website.
https://www.ksl.com/?sid=26594721&nid=148
-------------------
Sadly, this event never took place.
I kept my eye on it on their website, and they even had a location for it scheduled in Heber around the 24th of July, Utah's "Pioneer Days".
But eventually all the bull runs this group were scheduling were eventually canceled due to the animal rights activists and the lawsuits they were threatening. The organizers decided it just wasn't worth the hassle.
August 22, 2014
August 21, 2014
Cave Creek Arizona, February 7-9, 2014
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| Ouch ! |
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| I normally don't like people running in costume but this guy nailed it ! |
August 15, 2014
Running of Bulls Is Risky, but Liability Is Low
(by Marc Lacey nytimes.com 10-5-11)
As Hemingway pointed out, sprinting ahead of a herd of snarling bulls certainly makes the
Phil Immordino, who organized three bull runs in Nevada and Arizona a decade ago modeled on
Mr. Immordino expects hundreds of runners to sprint along a quarter-mile track while being pursued by dozens of 1,500-pound rodeo bulls with names like Blood Money and Dooms Day. Also expected are animal rights activists, who take a dim view of an event they find cruel on its face.
Before anyone runs, though, he or she is required to sign, and then sign some more.
“We have a seven-page waiver, and they need to initial every paragraph and every page,” said Mr. Immordino, a Phoenix native who also organizes
Betsy Grey, an expert on tort law at the
Mr. Immordino said he and others involved in the run had plenty of insurance in case anything went awry. He has $1 million in coverage, he said, and the owner of the private land where he will run the bulls has another million. The owner of the bulls has additional insurance and the landowner has liability insurance on his property as well, he added. Just in case, there will be paramedics and rodeo clowns at the ready and escape routes are in place along the route to allow runners to veer away from bulls that get too close.
Town officials had initially approved a special-event permit allowing Mr. Immordino to move forward with the running, so long as he came up with $5 million in insurance. That figure was lowered to $3 million. When the town and the promoter could not reach agreement on the level of insurance coverage, Cave Creek withdrew the permit but allowed the spectacle to go ahead on private property and told Mr. Immordino that he would be liable should anything occur.
“I think whenever you mix bulls and humans in this kind of setting we have enough evidence from Spain that there can be problems,” said Vincent Francia, Cave Creek’s mayor. “I will hold my breath until it’s over.”
Organizers are more optimistic.
“We’re covered,” said Mr. Immordino, who is busy preparing the bull run, which will begin Oct. 14 and continue through Oct. 16. “We’ve never even had a sniff of a claim against us.”
That is not to say there have not been mishaps in his three previous efforts to bring a Spanish tradition that goes back centuries to the American West.
Mr. Immordino was arrested in 1998 after he failed to get proper permission to hold a bull run in northwestern Arizona, just across the Nevada line. In 1999, heavy rain kept crowds away from a bull run in Mesquite, Nev. In 2002, in
Actual participants have fared better. Nobody has been gored, although video of the 2002 run shows one runner crumpled in the dirt with his arms over his head as bulls jump over him. Mr. Immordino said that the bulls he uses were less aggressive and have duller horns than the ones that run along the cobblestone streets of Pamplona, where the running of the bulls was immortalized by
Running of the Bull, American Style (i.e., Tame)
(by Frank Bruni nytimes.com 7-12-98)
Pumped up by the sort of foolishness that flourishes at bachelor parties as nowhere else, Jim Hamill and several buddies interrupted their weekend-long debauchery in Las Vegas to drive about an hour northeast to a dusty ranch here for what they expected to be the wildest, craziest adventure imaginable.
Along with more than 600 other people, they entered a long, narrow pen this morning to be chased by, and run with, massive bulls weighing up to 1,500 pounds, an event meant to evoke the violent, sometimes lethal rampage every July in the streets of Pamplona, Spain. Mr. Hamill said he had figured it would be good for a flood of sweet adrenaline. But he was forced to make do with a trickle.
''It wasn't exactly what I expected,'' Mr. Hamill, a Los Angeles police officer, conceded moments after his brush with the bulls was over. ''One minute the bulls were behind us, then they were gone. You couldn't really even see them through the dust.''
After all the chest thumping by promoters and hand wringing by animal welfare advocates, all the swaggering by those who planned to participate and gawking by those who stormed the sidelines to watch, the first ''Running of the Bulls'' in the United States was a relatively tame spectacle, less bloody rampage than bizarre promenade.
August 3, 2014
Chicago, June 7, 2014
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| On grass again |
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| Lots of people taking pictures with their phones but not running |
Dallas, April 5, 2014
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| Finally we get some action |
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| Give the guy credit for mixing it up unlike many others |
September 30, 2013
Annual Cave Creek bull run to expand to 2 days
(by Philip Haldiman azcentral.com 7-12-13)
Heading into its third year in Cave Creek, Running With The Bulls USA has become a staple event in the northeast Valley, and event officials say it stands to be more of a draw this year.
Promoter Phil Immordino has announced that the event, scheduled for October, will expand to two days, nearly double the runs and more than double the cash prizes.
“We’re serious about making this an extreme sport,” he said.
But town officials remain concerned about the potential dangers of the event.
Last year, the event ran over one day with seven runs, and a $1,000 cash prize for the top runner. This year, it’s scheduled to run over two days with six runs each day and a $500 cash prize for the top runner in each race.
Immordino said a $5,000 grand prize will be given out, for a total of more than $10,000 in cash prizes this year, encouraging participants to run as close to the bulls for as long as they can.
He’s also brought on a public-relations firm to improve marketing, in particular social media, which wasn’t aggressively used in the past. He’s hoping this, along with increased prize money, will lead to a bigger turnout.
“In light of the mud runs, the Spartan races and all the other extreme sports out there, we’re looking to expand our opportunity, and also capitalize on social media, maximizing Facebook, YouTube and Twitter,” he said.
Immordino, a Phoenix native, is no stranger to spearheading these high-risk events. This will be the sixth Americanized running of the bulls he has promoted — in 1998 and ’99 in Mesquite, Nev., and in 2002 at Rawhide, when it was located in Scottsdale.
He said the same safety precautions that were used last year will be used again this year — a wide, quarter-mile track, rodeo clowns and escape exits every 100 feet.
The bull runs will take place on 7 acres owned by Cave Creek resident Collin “T.C.” Thorstenson in the town’s commercial core.
For the two years Cave Creek has played host to the bull run, the event has drawn ire from animal-rights activists and others concerned about safety, attracting national media because of the controversy.
The first year, the town rescinded a special-event permit because of insurance and safety concerns. Town officials said that because the bull run is on private property, the promoter can still hold the event, but because the permit was rescinded, making it an unsanctioned town event, Cave Creek is not liable for claims that may happen during the runnings.
Mayor Vincent Francia said he’s had concerns since the beginning.
Last year, two people were sent to the hospital and at least six others suffered minor injuries after “bigger and badder” bulls were brought in for the second event. Immordino said runners at the first event in Cave Creek complained of “wimpy” bulls.
“The first year, they were your grandfather’s calves posing as bulls,” Francia said. “Then during the second year, they brought in the big bulls.”
Francia said he doesn’t want to deprive a subculture of thrill seekers, but says that at the same time, he has to make sure the town is protected, while respecting people’s private-property rights.
Francia says he holds his breath every year when the bulls are released from the starting gates.
“When we do the event, we get swamped with e-mails from all over the world,” he said. “I get the extreme-sports stuff. I do. But this is taking place in Cave Creek. We’re not Spain. At what point do you say, ‘Whoops’? Does it take someone to get hurt or for someone to die?”
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http://www.azcentral.com/community/scottsdale/articles/20130708annual-cave-creek-bull-run-expand-days.html
September 22, 2013
September 20, 2013
Running with the Bulls—on a Virginia Racetrack
A watered-down version of the classic Spanish tradition comes to the U.S., but can it offer comparable thrills?
(by Svati Kirsten Narula theatlantic.com 8-29-13)
For some, life just isn’t complete without partaking in a beer-soaked rodeo and food fight modeled after a centuries-old Spanish tradition. And so on August 24, the inaugural Great Bull Run thundered into central Virginia, the first of nine such events that will take place in cities nationwide between now and next summer. The franchise aims to bring a taste of Pamplona, Spain’s famous San Fermin Festival to the United States, on the premise that being chased through a crowd by a herd of livestock is just so thrilling that it ought to be commercialized, made accessible, bottled, and sold to anyone over the age of eighteen who can sign a waiver.
The guy behind all this is 34-year-old Rob Dickens, a North Carolina native who started the Rugged Maniac race series – obstacle-course adventures much like the well-known Tough Mudder events -- in Boston three years ago. Last summer, Dickens and his business partner Brad Scudder wanted to travel to Spain for San Fermin, but logistics proved too tricky – “You need about $3,000 a person for your flights and your trains and a week’s worth of hotel rooms in Pamplona during the busiest time of the year, and then you’ve gotta be able to get away from work for seven, eight, nine days… which for a lot of the people here in the U.S. is pretty difficult,” he said. “Being event organizers, we started joking around about bringing it here to the U.S., and at some point it morphed from a joke into reality.”
Dickens actually isn’t the first to try this. Phil Immordino, from Phoenix, Arizona, hosted three bull runs in the Southwest in 1998, 1999, and 2002. Those efforts were foiled by mishaps and Immordino struggled to turn a profit. In 2011, he tried again; now the Running of the Bulls USA is going on its third year in Cave Creek, Arizona. Runners compete for cash prizes, and the event is backed up by a handful of million-dollar insurance policies.
As for the Great Bull Run, Dickens declined to disclose the specific details of his race’s insurance coverage but did say that getting insurance was “probably the biggest challenge” he and Scudder faced in the event planning process. “It took us a lot of knocking on doors, probably trying 30 different companies before we found one who did want to insure us,” said Dickens. “But I think that after our first few events, when [they] see that people are not dying [and] are not getting very seriously injured, then other insurance companies will come knocking on our door trying to give us a better rate.”
People are drawn to the Great Bull Run because they want to take risks, but no one wants to actually suffer the potential consequences posed therein, so Dickens had better keep those risks tightly controlled.
“The biggest worry is that somebody would get seriously injured, or killed,” he said, stating the obvious. “That’s the worst thing that could possibly happen – that, or a bull getting seriously injured or dying,” he added—a heartening note for animal lovers.
He said he’s confident that neither of those things will happen. Only 15 people have died running with the bulls in Pamplona in the past 102 years, after all, and that’s with certain elements of danger that won’t be found at any of Dickens’s events. Instead of city streets walled in by buildings, the Virginia Great Bull Run is set at a drag racing strip, “where we create a track enclosed by cattle fencing,” Dickens said, “which people can climb up on and hop over if they want to. There are also nooks along the way where people can sidestep an incoming bull if they have to. You don’t have those in Pamplona.”
“I imagine people will get tossed around,” he admitted. “People will get hurt. Bruises, scrapes, maybe a broken bone or two, but I don’t expect people to get seriously injured. I don’t expect people to die.” Ultimately, this is the “same thing as skydiving or driving a racecar or bungee-jumping,” he said. You know that there’s a risk there, but you don’t care. You want to do it anyway.”
The Great Bull Run website is pretty snazzy, peppered with dramatic photographs from Pamplona – to be swapped out once images from the new events come through – and promises of fun. “Face the adrenaline rush of a lifetime”; “It’s not as dangerous as you think”; it’s a “massive festival” and an “epic day of fun!” The rhetoric on display, upon closer inspection, approaches that persuasive trifecta of appeals to emotion, logic, and even ethics: a combination of cheesy marketing slogans, no-nonsense facts, unapologetic respect for the value of cheap thrills, and details about the bulls' humane care and home on an "open-air ranch."
As of Friday, August 23, the website showed that nearly four thousand individuals had registered to run with the bulls in Virginia, sight unseen.
Petersburg, Virginia is 131 miles from Washington, D.C., 23 miles south of Richmond. On Saturday morning I drove past Cracker Barrel after Cracker Barrel, Civil War landmark after Civil War landmark, with my 14-year-old brother in the passenger seat watching Derek Thompson’s economic explainer videos on his iPhone and occasionally griping about the distance we were traveling.
Around 11:30 a.m. and approximately two miles from our destination, we stopped at a gas station for water and snacks. Inside, the two cashiers behind the counter, both girls about my age, craned their necks to watch a video on a customer’s cell phone. The man had just run with the bulls, and he told the girls that it was “crazy.” The girls relayed his other comments after he’d left: “He said he wouldn’t do it again,” and “he said that you can feel the hooves thundering on the ground beneath you.”
“We’ve heard other people placing bets on how many people are going to die today,” they told us. On our way back to the car we met two guys dressed in red and blue skintight bodysuits – available at morphsuits.com, in case anyone’s wondering -- practically jumping up and down with energy. They looked barely over 18, the minimum age required to run with the bulls, but that was clearly what they had just done.
“Biggest adrenaline rush ever,” shouted the guy in the red suit. His friend in blue nodded. “It was like riding twenty or thirty rollercoasters at once!”
Five minutes later we joined a long line of cars waiting to enter the Virginia Motorsports Park. Across the road, a group of protestors—perhaps 30 to 50—stood silent and holding signs, advocating for the welfare of the bulls.
According to Dickens, the job of the bulls that day was relatively easy and safe (for them), and not one that went against what they were bred for. These were rodeo bulls, accustomed to traveling around the country to perform, brought to Virginia by their handlers and accompanied by veterinarians -- making the whole affair not so different from horse racing.
Dickens said it’s not good for bulls to run on pavement, and that that’s why he spent $30,000 to lay down dirt on top of the drag strip at the Virginia Motorsports Complex. “We will spend probably another $30,000 to take it back up again after the event is over,” he said. “And the only reason we did that is to protect the bulls’ legs. We’re not spending $60,000 for the benefit of the runners; it’s solely for the bulls.”
In Pamplona, in addition to running on slick cobblestone streets, the bulls must navigate – or attempt to navigate -- a course with sharp turns, where “they slam into the walls, and each other, and they get injured,” said Dickens. “We don’t want any of that happening, so all of our courses are either straightaways or gentle ovals like horse racing tracks. … After each and every run, the bulls will be inspected by veterinarians to make sure that they’re all safe and sound and fit to run again later in the day.”
The quarter-mile dragstrip was flanked by bleachers, only one side of which was full of spectators, who weren’t allowed on the other side. Seven times that day, groups of up to 500 people at a time would file onto the strip, wave red bandanas and run with the bulls amid roaring cheers.
The scene behind the bleachers was similar to that of a county fair – fried food, hot dogs, popcorn, overpriced lemonade, branded merchandise (shirts that said “I came. I saw. I ran.”). And plenty of beer. There was also a stage off to the side for a band, two mechanical bulls, two inflatable jousting bounces, and a tent advertising the Halloween event at Virginia Motorsports Park: a zombie run.
Every so often a voice would boom from a loudspeaker with exclamations including “Just like in Pamplona!” and “History in the making today!” or “If you want to run again after your first time, it’s only thirty dollars! Thirty dollars to run with the bulls a second time!”
In Pamplona, the running of the bulls is a week-long affair, during which the running isn't even the main attraction. The central tradition of the festival has always been the bullfight, featuring matadors with their swords and, in the famous words of Ernest Hemingway, “violent death... pride... and true enjoyment of killing.” Running with the bulls through the city’s cobblestone streets began as a way of getting the animals from their corrals to the bullfighting arena – even though it evolved into its own tradition, it was never a standalone recreational activity.
We don’t tend to embrace live performances of violent death as art here in the U.S., and on this Saturday in Virginia, the lack of a bullfight at the end of the run didn’t seem to strip the activity of its meaning. One doubts whether most participants thought much about the “meaning” of their activities that day, anyway.
Spotted filing onto the track for the 1 p.m. bull run: one man in a poncho, another in a bright red suit, one man in boxers patterned with American flags, four guys wearing green “Keep Calm and Chive On” tee shirts, two guys wearing skimpy Speedos and Superman shields, a crew of young men and women sporting University of Virginia lacrosse pinnies, the two female hosts of the television show Fit to be Wild, and countless people with GoPro cameras strapped to their heads and chests. Almost everyone wore at least one piece of red clothing in addition to the red bandana they all received from event staff as they passed through the fence onto the track.
As the runners mugged for the cameras and situated themselves along the fence, the voice on the loudspeaker blared: “If you feel like you’re not up to it, because there IS a serious risk of injury, hop out! There’s no shame in being sane!”
“Don’t sit on the fence. Remember once you exit there is NO getting back in. If you need to exit and a BULL happens to be coming for your BUTT, you may jump the fence! You are encouraged [to do so], as this is your only way out once the bulls begin to run. If you happen to fall, cover your head and lay on the ground and let them pass, ladies and gentlemen. If any staff member should give you additional instructions, make sure you follow them to the letter, and let’s have a fun bull run, y’all!
The crowd cheered, and the “Bull Honorific” began.
“Go ahead, take those special bandanas, fold ‘em in half! Hold ‘em up high!” said the announcer. “Ladies and gentlemen, once again, the Bull Honorific! Say it with me…”
Announcer: Here we are
Crowd: Here we are
Announcer: The courageous few
Crowd: The courageous few
Announcer: To TEST ourselves
Crowd: To test ourselves
Announcer: And HONOR the Bull!
Crowd: And honor the bull!
Announcer: From those that run
Crowd: From those that run
Announcer: To those who fall
Crowd: To those who fall
Announcer: We HONOR the BULL
Crowd: We honor the bull
Announcer: And SALUTE you ALLLLLLLL!
The classic music from the western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” played in the background as Allen delivered further instructions. The countdown neared.
“All right, ladies and gentlemen, let’s get even more psyched up! When I say bull, you say run!”
“BULL!” – “Run!”
“BULL!” – “Run!”
“Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to RUN?! I can’t hear you -- are you ready to run?! Count it down backwards with me: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, RUNNNNNNNN!”
The bulls were released, and the crowd cheered.
“Here they come! This is the speed we were looking for, ladies and gentlemen, towards the crowd! Here they come! Oh my, they look like they’re targeting people! Look at them go, ladies and gentlemen, spreading out across the track with all the runners! Go go go!”
People weren’t dying left and right, but some were bailing left and right – rushing to the sides of the track, clinging to the fences and hopping over as fast as they were able to while the rest ran alongside, in front, and behind the bulls. It was all over in less than a minute.
“And that’s grabbing life by the horns, y’all!”
In between runs, the bulls rested in shaded corrals. They looked healthy. They had water. “We’re not using Spanish fighting bulls in our runs,” Dickens had said. “In Spain they release six steers and six Spanish fighting bulls in each run. But here, they’re just neutered bulls that are not very aggressive at all. Spanish Fighting Bulls, on the other hand, have been bred to be absolutely insane. Rodeo bulls are not as insane as Spanish fighting bulls are, but they are still aggressive.”
The bulls had come from Kentucky with the Lone Star Rodeo Company, where they live on an 800-acre farm when they’re not traveling and performing, according to Dickens. I ended up talking to Preston Fowlkes, Jr., whose father started Lone Star Rodeo in Texas in 1949. He said the bulls can run up to 25 miles per hour. I said that the runs I had seen so far looked pretty tame. “Well, I’ll tell you what, young lady,” he said. “Why don’t you go out there and run with them and see what you think.” Fair enough. With that, my brother and I went to get lunch.
Meanwhile, other participants rushed to buy goggles and before heading over to a fenced-in blacktop area where a crowd was forming: the Tomato Royale was about to start.
This was the less-touted, but arguably more fun, portion of the Great Bull Run. The Tomato Royale is a food fight in the fashion of Spain’s La Tomatina festival, which, in Spain, has nothing to do with the running of the bulls.
For about an hour the bulls got a break, as a couple thousand people pulverized tomatoes and I ate a falafel sandwich. When the fruit-throwers emerged from their event, each looked like he or she had bathed in salsa, and the air smelled putrid (for optimal splattering, Dickens said they made sure the 150,000 tomatoes were overripe).
Participants were giddy, though. 20-year-old Abhishek Battacharya said his four-hour drive from the Baltimore, Maryland area that morning was worth it “just for that one hour over there” with the tomatoes. Participating in something like this, Battacharya said, “you feel like you’re alive.”
A drenched couple asked me to take their picture in front of a Dinwiddie County ambulance, parked next to the (quiet, barely-utilized) first aid tent -- Deborah Goeller and Rick Dukehart. Last weekend, they said, they had been watching their 25-year-old son compete in a horse barrel racing event when someone cracked a joke about bullfighting, reminding them of the Great Bull Run; they checked the website and were easily convinced to make the seven-hour drive here from their home in Pittsburgh. “Skydiving, parasailing, rockclimbing, you name it,” said Dukehart, the family does it all.
Rick ran with the bulls. Deborah just did the tomato fight, which Rick said was more fun anyway. “People were slipping and sliding. You definitely needed the goggles.” They’re going to follow the Great Bull Run to Houston in December. “There’s like ten more across the country. I’m going to be definitely looking at the calendar and figuring out [which ones I can get to],” said Rick.
It was at this point in the afternoon when I decided to take Preston Fowlkes’s challenge and abandon the original plan of an observation-only reporting trip. I got myself a wristband for the 3 p.m. bull run, the last of the day.
The three-page waiver for this event, which Rob Dickens wrote himself (in another life, he was a Wall Street lawyer), is pretty thorough. There are all the warnings one would expect: “inherent risks” of a litany of injuries and, of course, death; the standout phrase “THE EVENT IS A HAZARDOUS ACTIVITY THAT PRESENTS A SERIOUS PHYSICAL AND MENTAL DANGER TO PARTICIPANTS AND SPECTATORS.” Sign the waiver and you release the Great Bull Run from any and all liability – you’re not allowed to sue the company, and neither is your brother or your best friend or your second cousin who lives in Canada.
Soon enough I found myself on the dirt track holding a red bandana over my head and chanting “We honor the bull.” A few minutes later, the herd came out of the corral. I was standing further down the track, so it took a while for them to get to me. As soon as the crowd started running, I started running, looking back periodically and trying not to fall from the many shoves and elbows that other runners were throwing.
I ran close to the fence as the bulls came by, kept moving, successfully stayed out of the way. About 100 meters from the end of the run, I saw a person splayed out on the ground – either unconscious or playing dead -- as bulls and people ran over and around him. At the end of the track, I chose not to jump the fence and instead watched the last bulls come through, getting face-to-face with them as they slowed, turned and went into their corral. “Man, I honestly don’t think that person is alive,” said a young man next to me. “Oh my God, did you see that?” Someone else muttered something about “the first casualty of the day.” We jogged back onto the track, where a crowd was forming around the fallen runner.
Before I had time to contemplate the distastefulness of joining the circle to gawk at the injured man, cheers and applause erupted to greet the collective realization that he was going to be okay. Heart beating a bit faster than usual, I sprinted away to find my brother.
“I wish I could have run,” he said wistfully as we walked to the car.
“You didn’t miss anything,” I replied, thinking back in wonder to the young man who’d compared this to riding twenty rollercoasters at once.
“Still,” he said. “Now you can tell people that you did this.”
“Yeah, I guess bragging rights are cool.”
We returned home, and the bulls returned to their open-air ranch in Kentucky, to be hauled out again in October when the Great Bull Run gallops on to Georgia.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/08/running-with-the-bulls-on-a-virginia-racetrack/279180/#comments
(by Svati Kirsten Narula theatlantic.com 8-29-13)
For some, life just isn’t complete without partaking in a beer-soaked rodeo and food fight modeled after a centuries-old Spanish tradition. And so on August 24, the inaugural Great Bull Run thundered into central Virginia, the first of nine such events that will take place in cities nationwide between now and next summer. The franchise aims to bring a taste of Pamplona, Spain’s famous San Fermin Festival to the United States, on the premise that being chased through a crowd by a herd of livestock is just so thrilling that it ought to be commercialized, made accessible, bottled, and sold to anyone over the age of eighteen who can sign a waiver.
The guy behind all this is 34-year-old Rob Dickens, a North Carolina native who started the Rugged Maniac race series – obstacle-course adventures much like the well-known Tough Mudder events -- in Boston three years ago. Last summer, Dickens and his business partner Brad Scudder wanted to travel to Spain for San Fermin, but logistics proved too tricky – “You need about $3,000 a person for your flights and your trains and a week’s worth of hotel rooms in Pamplona during the busiest time of the year, and then you’ve gotta be able to get away from work for seven, eight, nine days… which for a lot of the people here in the U.S. is pretty difficult,” he said. “Being event organizers, we started joking around about bringing it here to the U.S., and at some point it morphed from a joke into reality.”
Dickens actually isn’t the first to try this. Phil Immordino, from Phoenix, Arizona, hosted three bull runs in the Southwest in 1998, 1999, and 2002. Those efforts were foiled by mishaps and Immordino struggled to turn a profit. In 2011, he tried again; now the Running of the Bulls USA is going on its third year in Cave Creek, Arizona. Runners compete for cash prizes, and the event is backed up by a handful of million-dollar insurance policies.
As for the Great Bull Run, Dickens declined to disclose the specific details of his race’s insurance coverage but did say that getting insurance was “probably the biggest challenge” he and Scudder faced in the event planning process. “It took us a lot of knocking on doors, probably trying 30 different companies before we found one who did want to insure us,” said Dickens. “But I think that after our first few events, when [they] see that people are not dying [and] are not getting very seriously injured, then other insurance companies will come knocking on our door trying to give us a better rate.”
People are drawn to the Great Bull Run because they want to take risks, but no one wants to actually suffer the potential consequences posed therein, so Dickens had better keep those risks tightly controlled.
“The biggest worry is that somebody would get seriously injured, or killed,” he said, stating the obvious. “That’s the worst thing that could possibly happen – that, or a bull getting seriously injured or dying,” he added—a heartening note for animal lovers.
He said he’s confident that neither of those things will happen. Only 15 people have died running with the bulls in Pamplona in the past 102 years, after all, and that’s with certain elements of danger that won’t be found at any of Dickens’s events. Instead of city streets walled in by buildings, the Virginia Great Bull Run is set at a drag racing strip, “where we create a track enclosed by cattle fencing,” Dickens said, “which people can climb up on and hop over if they want to. There are also nooks along the way where people can sidestep an incoming bull if they have to. You don’t have those in Pamplona.”
“I imagine people will get tossed around,” he admitted. “People will get hurt. Bruises, scrapes, maybe a broken bone or two, but I don’t expect people to get seriously injured. I don’t expect people to die.” Ultimately, this is the “same thing as skydiving or driving a racecar or bungee-jumping,” he said. You know that there’s a risk there, but you don’t care. You want to do it anyway.”
The Great Bull Run website is pretty snazzy, peppered with dramatic photographs from Pamplona – to be swapped out once images from the new events come through – and promises of fun. “Face the adrenaline rush of a lifetime”; “It’s not as dangerous as you think”; it’s a “massive festival” and an “epic day of fun!” The rhetoric on display, upon closer inspection, approaches that persuasive trifecta of appeals to emotion, logic, and even ethics: a combination of cheesy marketing slogans, no-nonsense facts, unapologetic respect for the value of cheap thrills, and details about the bulls' humane care and home on an "open-air ranch."
As of Friday, August 23, the website showed that nearly four thousand individuals had registered to run with the bulls in Virginia, sight unseen.
Petersburg, Virginia is 131 miles from Washington, D.C., 23 miles south of Richmond. On Saturday morning I drove past Cracker Barrel after Cracker Barrel, Civil War landmark after Civil War landmark, with my 14-year-old brother in the passenger seat watching Derek Thompson’s economic explainer videos on his iPhone and occasionally griping about the distance we were traveling.
Around 11:30 a.m. and approximately two miles from our destination, we stopped at a gas station for water and snacks. Inside, the two cashiers behind the counter, both girls about my age, craned their necks to watch a video on a customer’s cell phone. The man had just run with the bulls, and he told the girls that it was “crazy.” The girls relayed his other comments after he’d left: “He said he wouldn’t do it again,” and “he said that you can feel the hooves thundering on the ground beneath you.”
“We’ve heard other people placing bets on how many people are going to die today,” they told us. On our way back to the car we met two guys dressed in red and blue skintight bodysuits – available at morphsuits.com, in case anyone’s wondering -- practically jumping up and down with energy. They looked barely over 18, the minimum age required to run with the bulls, but that was clearly what they had just done.
“Biggest adrenaline rush ever,” shouted the guy in the red suit. His friend in blue nodded. “It was like riding twenty or thirty rollercoasters at once!”
Five minutes later we joined a long line of cars waiting to enter the Virginia Motorsports Park. Across the road, a group of protestors—perhaps 30 to 50—stood silent and holding signs, advocating for the welfare of the bulls.
According to Dickens, the job of the bulls that day was relatively easy and safe (for them), and not one that went against what they were bred for. These were rodeo bulls, accustomed to traveling around the country to perform, brought to Virginia by their handlers and accompanied by veterinarians -- making the whole affair not so different from horse racing.
Dickens said it’s not good for bulls to run on pavement, and that that’s why he spent $30,000 to lay down dirt on top of the drag strip at the Virginia Motorsports Complex. “We will spend probably another $30,000 to take it back up again after the event is over,” he said. “And the only reason we did that is to protect the bulls’ legs. We’re not spending $60,000 for the benefit of the runners; it’s solely for the bulls.”
In Pamplona, in addition to running on slick cobblestone streets, the bulls must navigate – or attempt to navigate -- a course with sharp turns, where “they slam into the walls, and each other, and they get injured,” said Dickens. “We don’t want any of that happening, so all of our courses are either straightaways or gentle ovals like horse racing tracks. … After each and every run, the bulls will be inspected by veterinarians to make sure that they’re all safe and sound and fit to run again later in the day.”
The quarter-mile dragstrip was flanked by bleachers, only one side of which was full of spectators, who weren’t allowed on the other side. Seven times that day, groups of up to 500 people at a time would file onto the strip, wave red bandanas and run with the bulls amid roaring cheers.
The scene behind the bleachers was similar to that of a county fair – fried food, hot dogs, popcorn, overpriced lemonade, branded merchandise (shirts that said “I came. I saw. I ran.”). And plenty of beer. There was also a stage off to the side for a band, two mechanical bulls, two inflatable jousting bounces, and a tent advertising the Halloween event at Virginia Motorsports Park: a zombie run.
Every so often a voice would boom from a loudspeaker with exclamations including “Just like in Pamplona!” and “History in the making today!” or “If you want to run again after your first time, it’s only thirty dollars! Thirty dollars to run with the bulls a second time!”
In Pamplona, the running of the bulls is a week-long affair, during which the running isn't even the main attraction. The central tradition of the festival has always been the bullfight, featuring matadors with their swords and, in the famous words of Ernest Hemingway, “violent death... pride... and true enjoyment of killing.” Running with the bulls through the city’s cobblestone streets began as a way of getting the animals from their corrals to the bullfighting arena – even though it evolved into its own tradition, it was never a standalone recreational activity.
We don’t tend to embrace live performances of violent death as art here in the U.S., and on this Saturday in Virginia, the lack of a bullfight at the end of the run didn’t seem to strip the activity of its meaning. One doubts whether most participants thought much about the “meaning” of their activities that day, anyway.
Spotted filing onto the track for the 1 p.m. bull run: one man in a poncho, another in a bright red suit, one man in boxers patterned with American flags, four guys wearing green “Keep Calm and Chive On” tee shirts, two guys wearing skimpy Speedos and Superman shields, a crew of young men and women sporting University of Virginia lacrosse pinnies, the two female hosts of the television show Fit to be Wild, and countless people with GoPro cameras strapped to their heads and chests. Almost everyone wore at least one piece of red clothing in addition to the red bandana they all received from event staff as they passed through the fence onto the track.
As the runners mugged for the cameras and situated themselves along the fence, the voice on the loudspeaker blared: “If you feel like you’re not up to it, because there IS a serious risk of injury, hop out! There’s no shame in being sane!”
“Don’t sit on the fence. Remember once you exit there is NO getting back in. If you need to exit and a BULL happens to be coming for your BUTT, you may jump the fence! You are encouraged [to do so], as this is your only way out once the bulls begin to run. If you happen to fall, cover your head and lay on the ground and let them pass, ladies and gentlemen. If any staff member should give you additional instructions, make sure you follow them to the letter, and let’s have a fun bull run, y’all!
The crowd cheered, and the “Bull Honorific” began.
“Go ahead, take those special bandanas, fold ‘em in half! Hold ‘em up high!” said the announcer. “Ladies and gentlemen, once again, the Bull Honorific! Say it with me…”
Announcer: Here we are
Crowd: Here we are
Announcer: The courageous few
Crowd: The courageous few
Announcer: To TEST ourselves
Crowd: To test ourselves
Announcer: And HONOR the Bull!
Crowd: And honor the bull!
Announcer: From those that run
Crowd: From those that run
Announcer: To those who fall
Crowd: To those who fall
Announcer: We HONOR the BULL
Crowd: We honor the bull
Announcer: And SALUTE you ALLLLLLLL!
The classic music from the western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” played in the background as Allen delivered further instructions. The countdown neared.
“All right, ladies and gentlemen, let’s get even more psyched up! When I say bull, you say run!”
“BULL!” – “Run!”
“BULL!” – “Run!”
“Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to RUN?! I can’t hear you -- are you ready to run?! Count it down backwards with me: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, RUNNNNNNNN!”
The bulls were released, and the crowd cheered.
“Here they come! This is the speed we were looking for, ladies and gentlemen, towards the crowd! Here they come! Oh my, they look like they’re targeting people! Look at them go, ladies and gentlemen, spreading out across the track with all the runners! Go go go!”
People weren’t dying left and right, but some were bailing left and right – rushing to the sides of the track, clinging to the fences and hopping over as fast as they were able to while the rest ran alongside, in front, and behind the bulls. It was all over in less than a minute.
“And that’s grabbing life by the horns, y’all!”
In between runs, the bulls rested in shaded corrals. They looked healthy. They had water. “We’re not using Spanish fighting bulls in our runs,” Dickens had said. “In Spain they release six steers and six Spanish fighting bulls in each run. But here, they’re just neutered bulls that are not very aggressive at all. Spanish Fighting Bulls, on the other hand, have been bred to be absolutely insane. Rodeo bulls are not as insane as Spanish fighting bulls are, but they are still aggressive.”
The bulls had come from Kentucky with the Lone Star Rodeo Company, where they live on an 800-acre farm when they’re not traveling and performing, according to Dickens. I ended up talking to Preston Fowlkes, Jr., whose father started Lone Star Rodeo in Texas in 1949. He said the bulls can run up to 25 miles per hour. I said that the runs I had seen so far looked pretty tame. “Well, I’ll tell you what, young lady,” he said. “Why don’t you go out there and run with them and see what you think.” Fair enough. With that, my brother and I went to get lunch.
Meanwhile, other participants rushed to buy goggles and before heading over to a fenced-in blacktop area where a crowd was forming: the Tomato Royale was about to start.
This was the less-touted, but arguably more fun, portion of the Great Bull Run. The Tomato Royale is a food fight in the fashion of Spain’s La Tomatina festival, which, in Spain, has nothing to do with the running of the bulls.
For about an hour the bulls got a break, as a couple thousand people pulverized tomatoes and I ate a falafel sandwich. When the fruit-throwers emerged from their event, each looked like he or she had bathed in salsa, and the air smelled putrid (for optimal splattering, Dickens said they made sure the 150,000 tomatoes were overripe).
Participants were giddy, though. 20-year-old Abhishek Battacharya said his four-hour drive from the Baltimore, Maryland area that morning was worth it “just for that one hour over there” with the tomatoes. Participating in something like this, Battacharya said, “you feel like you’re alive.”
A drenched couple asked me to take their picture in front of a Dinwiddie County ambulance, parked next to the (quiet, barely-utilized) first aid tent -- Deborah Goeller and Rick Dukehart. Last weekend, they said, they had been watching their 25-year-old son compete in a horse barrel racing event when someone cracked a joke about bullfighting, reminding them of the Great Bull Run; they checked the website and were easily convinced to make the seven-hour drive here from their home in Pittsburgh. “Skydiving, parasailing, rockclimbing, you name it,” said Dukehart, the family does it all.
Rick ran with the bulls. Deborah just did the tomato fight, which Rick said was more fun anyway. “People were slipping and sliding. You definitely needed the goggles.” They’re going to follow the Great Bull Run to Houston in December. “There’s like ten more across the country. I’m going to be definitely looking at the calendar and figuring out [which ones I can get to],” said Rick.
It was at this point in the afternoon when I decided to take Preston Fowlkes’s challenge and abandon the original plan of an observation-only reporting trip. I got myself a wristband for the 3 p.m. bull run, the last of the day.
The three-page waiver for this event, which Rob Dickens wrote himself (in another life, he was a Wall Street lawyer), is pretty thorough. There are all the warnings one would expect: “inherent risks” of a litany of injuries and, of course, death; the standout phrase “THE EVENT IS A HAZARDOUS ACTIVITY THAT PRESENTS A SERIOUS PHYSICAL AND MENTAL DANGER TO PARTICIPANTS AND SPECTATORS.” Sign the waiver and you release the Great Bull Run from any and all liability – you’re not allowed to sue the company, and neither is your brother or your best friend or your second cousin who lives in Canada.
Soon enough I found myself on the dirt track holding a red bandana over my head and chanting “We honor the bull.” A few minutes later, the herd came out of the corral. I was standing further down the track, so it took a while for them to get to me. As soon as the crowd started running, I started running, looking back periodically and trying not to fall from the many shoves and elbows that other runners were throwing.
I ran close to the fence as the bulls came by, kept moving, successfully stayed out of the way. About 100 meters from the end of the run, I saw a person splayed out on the ground – either unconscious or playing dead -- as bulls and people ran over and around him. At the end of the track, I chose not to jump the fence and instead watched the last bulls come through, getting face-to-face with them as they slowed, turned and went into their corral. “Man, I honestly don’t think that person is alive,” said a young man next to me. “Oh my God, did you see that?” Someone else muttered something about “the first casualty of the day.” We jogged back onto the track, where a crowd was forming around the fallen runner.
Before I had time to contemplate the distastefulness of joining the circle to gawk at the injured man, cheers and applause erupted to greet the collective realization that he was going to be okay. Heart beating a bit faster than usual, I sprinted away to find my brother.
“I wish I could have run,” he said wistfully as we walked to the car.
“You didn’t miss anything,” I replied, thinking back in wonder to the young man who’d compared this to riding twenty rollercoasters at once.
“Still,” he said. “Now you can tell people that you did this.”
“Yeah, I guess bragging rights are cool.”
We returned home, and the bulls returned to their open-air ranch in Kentucky, to be hauled out again in October when the Great Bull Run gallops on to Georgia.
--------------------
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/08/running-with-the-bulls-on-a-virginia-racetrack/279180/#comments
September 19, 2013
Running of the bulls, Petersburg Virginia
I know, the purists out there are probably shaking their heads in disgust, but this is the best we are going to get in America. We are lucky we can even get this with the political correctness and animal welfare activism that is rampant in our country.
So if bloodless bullfights and somewhat tamer encierros is what we have to work with I say lets be thankful and enjoy it as much as possible. As for my area it looks like I will have a chance to run with the bulls in July of 2014. You can bet I will be there and ready for turn "run in the horns."
So if bloodless bullfights and somewhat tamer encierros is what we have to work with I say lets be thankful and enjoy it as much as possible. As for my area it looks like I will have a chance to run with the bulls in July of 2014. You can bet I will be there and ready for turn "run in the horns."
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| a warning to all |
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| Viva San Fermin! |
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| La furia comienza |
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| Stampede! |
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| Not too many "running in the horns" yet |
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| One guy tries and gets leveled |
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| This runner does a little better |
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| This guy is about to get nailed |
August 29, 2013
Ole, toro! Mesquite bulls ready to paw, snort and run
(by Don Baker deseretnews.com 7-10-98)
Depending on your viewpoint, it's either the ultimate adrenalin rush; flat-out insanity or a barbaric "throwback to the Middle Ages."
For that modest fee, runners will get a T-shirt and red sash plus some inspiration to reflect on what kind of recreational opportunities may be available in the afterlife.
The field is expected to increase to at least 500 runners by Saturday, she said, and event organizers plan to accommodate thousands of spectators and reporters.
Modeled after the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, this event will have a distinct Wild West flavor and take place in "Mesquite Village" at the Oasis Ranch and Gun Club.
Granted, it's really not a village at all - just a collection of colorful facades whomped up to look like the Old West.
The bull run was moved to Oasis Ranch after the Nevada Department of Transportation nixed staging the event on a state road, so the "village" has been constructed to recreate an old-time ambience.
"We still want people to feel like they're running on Main Street," explained Kirk Lee, public relations director for the Oasis Hotel and Casino.
The adrenalin rush thing will be automatic for the runners: That comes naturally when you're scooting down a dirt road with several belligerent bovines who tip the scales at about three-quarters of a ton.
"It's somewhat of a crazy thing," Knuepfer conceded. "But the public response has been generally positive, and we've had a ton of media interest."
Lee said that in addition to national coverage by television and print media, he has been contacted by Spanish and German television news units that plan to cover the running.
The event, which was adopted by the five-casino Mesquite Resort Association after being rejected by city officials in Phoenix and Long Beach, "is accomplishing our goal of putting Mesquite on the map."
Animal rights activists and Humane Society officials, however, would like to use that map to swat association members and event organizers.
"This kind of a thing is a throwback to the Middle Ages," said Gene Baierschmidt, executive director of the Humane Society of Utah. "Civilized cultures in 1998 shouldn't be getting their kicks by pitting thrill-seeking human beings against terrified confused animals.
"This isn't sport, it isn't entertainment and it has no redeeming value in any setting," he added.
While one could probably make the same allegations against craps or blackjack, Baierschmidt is urging Humane Society members and the critter-loving public to write, fax, phone or e-mail their protests to the Mesquite City Council - and to boycott the city's casino bus-i-ness.
"The bull-running supporters stand to make money from this spectacle," he said. "It is our hope they find they've lost much more than they've gained when the whole mess is over."
Opposition from animal rights factions "is somewhat to be expected," Knuepfer said. But she also stressed that organizers have taken pains to ensure the event is as humane and non-threatening to the bulls as possible.
Unlike Pamplona, where the bulls run on concrete and cobblestone streets, the Mesquite bulls will be running on a 40-foot-wide dirt road with familiar corral-type fencing to channel both the two-footed and four-footed runners.
"We liken it to a bull-riding event at the rodeo as far as danger to the bulls is concerned," she said. "There won't be any poking or prodding of the bulls" or whipping or taunting like the animals at Pamplona.
Lee noted the safety of people is also a concern, so there will be a second fence inside the primary fence with gaps every 100 feet so runners can escape the flow of action if necessary.
In addition, lariat-swinging mounted cowboys and rodeo clowns disguised in street clothing will mix with the runners and provide some protection.
Even with those precautions, Lee said, there will still be an element of danger and runners must be at least 21 years of age, in good health, not be under the influence of drugs or alcohol and sign liability waivers before making the run.
The run will take place at 10 a.m. Saturday, Mesquite time, and admittance will be free. Bleachers are being provided for about 30,000 spectators.
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https://www.deseretnews.com/article/640690/Ole-toro-Mesquite-bulls-ready-to-paw-snort-and-run.html
August 17, 2013
Bulls to take turn riding the people
(by Lee Benson deseretnews.com 7-8-98)
Shane Holt, a good old cowboy from Enterprise, Utah, pitched a bale of hay in front of Smoky Joe, Grand Prize, Ol Blue, Little Tippy and a couple dozen of their bull friends he had recently unloaded off a semitrailer.
"They've all got names," said Holt, keeping a wary eye on his cattle, "and I know ever one of 'em."He also knows where they'll be Saturday morning.
Attempting to mow down a few hundred tourists.
Barring any last-minute restraining orders from Pamplona, Spain, which has the original copyright for this sort of thing, the running of the bulls, American West version, will take place when a band of rodeo bulls wearing the Slick Fork Ranch brand bear down on whoever pays his or her fifty dollars to get in the chute at the Oasis Gun Club Arena - and see if they can run a third of a mile faster than them bulls.
Unlike the original bull run in Pamplona, which began about 400 years ago and is run through city streets, Mesquite's event won't be run through its city streets because, when the Mesquite Resort Association ran the idea past the Nevada Highway Department, the scream was so loud you'd have thought it was Mike Tyson asking for his license back.
The event won't even be held in Mesquite, by point of fact, but just beyond city, and state, limits in an unincorporated section of Arizona, which means Arizona now has the distinction of importing from Europe both the London Bridge and the Pamplona Running of the Bulls.
Maybe it's not so strange that Evan Mecham was once elected governor there after all.
But geographical nuances aside, this is still very much a Nevada event and is in fact a turnabout on one of Nevada's proudest traditions: the prime rib buffet.
In this case, the entrees will be chasing the people in line.
When Ken Carter talks about the running of the bulls, he sees room tax.
Ken is the mayor of Mesquite - Nevada's fastest growing city, the mayor likes to point out, the last six years in a row.
When Ken graduated from Virgin Valley High in 1958, there weren't more than 750 people in the entire Virgin Valley. Now, there are 800 in the high school alone.
In the city of Mesquite, the population is 10,500 and growing by at least a couple of black jack dealers daily.
The reason for all the growth is what Nevadans call "gaming." Mesquite has five major gaming casinos, with 3,000 rooms, which, in the winter time, are more often than not filled.
But this isn't winter.
This is July, when Mesquite's high temperature hovers somewhere between 110 and complete asphalt meltdown.
"We needed something to fill the rooms in the summer," Ken said earlier this week as he drove his Chrysler close to the corral holding the bulls, air conditioner going full blast.
Swede Hansen, Shane Holt's partner, is justifiably proud of the rodeo stock the two have brought in for the big weekend.
Not only will the Slick Fork's bulls chase Mesquite's tourists on Saturday morning, but on Friday night they'll warm up by doing their usual gig at a bull-rider's competition at the rodeo grounds.
"There's a lot of 'em in here with an attitude," says Swede, who does little to contain either his pride or his amusement.
You can bet he'll have his boots draped over the corral rails Saturday, enjoying the show.
"We're putting some new stock in on Saturday," he says conspiratorially, looking at a pen adjacent to the one holding Ol Blue and his buddies - where the bulls are younger, scrawnier and maybe even meaner looking.
"Rookies," whispers Swede. "They haven't made their debut yet."
He laughs a cowboy's laugh. It isn't every day you get to see if the bulls can ride the people.
-----------------
https://www.deseretnews.com/article/640360/Bulls-to-take-turn-riding-the-people.html
Shane Holt, a good old cowboy from Enterprise, Utah, pitched a bale of hay in front of Smoky Joe, Grand Prize, Ol Blue, Little Tippy and a couple dozen of their bull friends he had recently unloaded off a semitrailer.
"They've all got names," said Holt, keeping a wary eye on his cattle, "and I know ever one of 'em."He also knows where they'll be Saturday morning.
Attempting to mow down a few hundred tourists.
Barring any last-minute restraining orders from Pamplona, Spain, which has the original copyright for this sort of thing, the running of the bulls, American West version, will take place when a band of rodeo bulls wearing the Slick Fork Ranch brand bear down on whoever pays his or her fifty dollars to get in the chute at the Oasis Gun Club Arena - and see if they can run a third of a mile faster than them bulls.
Unlike the original bull run in Pamplona, which began about 400 years ago and is run through city streets, Mesquite's event won't be run through its city streets because, when the Mesquite Resort Association ran the idea past the Nevada Highway Department, the scream was so loud you'd have thought it was Mike Tyson asking for his license back.
The event won't even be held in Mesquite, by point of fact, but just beyond city, and state, limits in an unincorporated section of Arizona, which means Arizona now has the distinction of importing from Europe both the London Bridge and the Pamplona Running of the Bulls.
Maybe it's not so strange that Evan Mecham was once elected governor there after all.
But geographical nuances aside, this is still very much a Nevada event and is in fact a turnabout on one of Nevada's proudest traditions: the prime rib buffet.
In this case, the entrees will be chasing the people in line.
When Ken Carter talks about the running of the bulls, he sees room tax.
Ken is the mayor of Mesquite - Nevada's fastest growing city, the mayor likes to point out, the last six years in a row.
When Ken graduated from Virgin Valley High in 1958, there weren't more than 750 people in the entire Virgin Valley. Now, there are 800 in the high school alone.
In the city of Mesquite, the population is 10,500 and growing by at least a couple of black jack dealers daily.
The reason for all the growth is what Nevadans call "gaming." Mesquite has five major gaming casinos, with 3,000 rooms, which, in the winter time, are more often than not filled.
But this isn't winter.
This is July, when Mesquite's high temperature hovers somewhere between 110 and complete asphalt meltdown.
"We needed something to fill the rooms in the summer," Ken said earlier this week as he drove his Chrysler close to the corral holding the bulls, air conditioner going full blast.
Swede Hansen, Shane Holt's partner, is justifiably proud of the rodeo stock the two have brought in for the big weekend.
Not only will the Slick Fork's bulls chase Mesquite's tourists on Saturday morning, but on Friday night they'll warm up by doing their usual gig at a bull-rider's competition at the rodeo grounds.
"There's a lot of 'em in here with an attitude," says Swede, who does little to contain either his pride or his amusement.
You can bet he'll have his boots draped over the corral rails Saturday, enjoying the show.
"We're putting some new stock in on Saturday," he says conspiratorially, looking at a pen adjacent to the one holding Ol Blue and his buddies - where the bulls are younger, scrawnier and maybe even meaner looking.
"Rookies," whispers Swede. "They haven't made their debut yet."
He laughs a cowboy's laugh. It isn't every day you get to see if the bulls can ride the people.
-----------------
https://www.deseretnews.com/article/640360/Bulls-to-take-turn-riding-the-people.html
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