Remembering Torly Urban 25 years on: I was a teenage bull runner too

Every year around this time my thoughts turn to a young Swede named, I think, Torly Urban.

Well, he won’t be so young now, I suppose – a couple of years older than me, and knocking on the door of 50. I think about Torly Urban because 25 years ago almost to the day I saw him gored through the thigh by a bull which then picked him up and galloped off, swinging the unlucky Swede around from its horn.

This was of course at the festival of St Fermin in the pretty hill-town of Pamplona in the Basque country of northern Spain. Starting on 7 July a week long party is held, characterised each morning by the fabled Running of the Bulls.

The streets are cordoned off and at 8am the bulls are released from a compound at one end. At the other is a stadium where they will ultimately meet their deaths in the corrida; but for that half mile the animals have a last-chance-saloon opportunity to get some revenge in first.

And that they did with Torly Urban, 23 years old in that summer of 1991. He had almost made it to the bullring when one animal turned and went for him. The images were all over the news, repeated on a loop on the screens around the town.

It was a couple more days before we were able to work up the courage to take part in the run.

Fermin was the son of a Roman senator who converted to Christianity, now the patron saint of Pamplona. The festival is not just about the running of the bulls, nor the waves of young people who make the pilgrimage there to party. You can probably thank Ernest Hemingway for popularising those aspects, though, with his 1926 novel Fiesta, also known as The Sun Also Rises.

There are parades, there are fireworks, there is The Roar, when everyone gathers outside the town hall at midnight and makes enough noise to wake the dead.

But it was the partying and the running of the bulls that attracted me and my friends in 1991. Looking at the official videos of the very run in which Torly Urban was gored that year, I find it curious now that I never considered the welfare of the animals back then. The League Against Cruel Sports in the UK has been particularly active in campaigning against the bull run, saying, “Once released, the bulls are frightened with gun shots, electrocuted with cattle prods and kicked and hit by jeering spectators, often down concrete or cobbled streets which they slip and slide on, suffering broken legs and other injuries in the process.”

But I was 21, buoyed on youth and machismo, drunk on red wine and Hemingway. We never actually went to watch the bullfights, though not I admit for any ethical reasons. More likely, we just wanted to party.

There has been bullfighting in Pamplona since the 14th Century; the first mentions of bull-running appear in the 17th and 18th Centuries though its popularity, especially among foreigners, is something that only began in the 20th Century. Hemingway first visited in 1923, and his novel is about rich, bored young Americans on the “grand tour”.

Hemingway never did the bull run, by all accounts. He’d have still been 23 on his first visit, the same age as Torly Urban. Perhaps he saw enough not to want to risk it himself, for all his two-fisted man of action reputation.

Even discounting the animal welfare issues, it’s neither big nor clever to stand, hungover in a Spanish street at an ungodly hour when you’ve been up all night, then run the longest kilometre of your life amid charging bulls, armed only with the defensive weapon of choice, a rolled-up newspaper.

It is, however, one of the most exhilarating experiences I imagine anyone could have. “The closer you are to death, the more alive you feel”. That seems like it should have been said by some wise sage; it’s from James Hunt, or at least Chris Hemsworth’s portrayal of the Formula 1 driver in the movie Rush. I’m not even sure Hunt ever said it at all.

But it rings with truth. I was never in danger on my bull run, not really. I kept running. But just as every year around this time I think of Torly Urban, I’m sure that Torly Urban – if that was even his name – thinks about that day even more. I hope he’s well, and I’ll be raising a glass to him this week – and to St Fermin, truly the greatest show on Earth.