Mexico City – A 14-year-old Spanish bullfighter lay connected to a respirator Monday after he was gored in an incident that has raised questions about young bullfighters, who increasingly have become an attraction in Latin America.
Jairo Miguel was billed as the youngest bullfighter in the world when he came to Mexico almost two years ago at age 12, apparently to escape Spain’s ban on bullfighters younger than 16.
Miguel came about an inch from likely death Sunday when a 910-pound bull at the Aguascalientes Monumental Bull Ring rushed him at top speed and lifted him on its horns, appearing to carry him several yards with a horn lodged in his chest. The wound ripped one of the slightly built boy’s lungs in half.
“It brushed his aorta and came 2 centimeters from the heart,” said Dr. Luis Romero, the surgeon who operated on Miguel at Aguascalientes’ Guadalupe Clinic.
“Lucky,” by an inch
“He was lucky, if you can call somebody who has been gored by a bull lucky,” Romero told The Associated Press. If the 4-inch gash had been 1 inch closer to the heart, “this surely would have been a catastrophe, where it would have been very difficult to control (the bleeding).”
The tendency toward younger fighters has raised questions.
“Bullfighting demonstrated today that it is an activity for men,” the government news agency Notimex said of Miguel’s injury, and noted the only thing he could be heard to say after the accident was, “I’m dying, Dad, I’m dying.”
His father, well-known bullfighter Antonio Sanchez Caceres, accompanied his son to Mexico and approves of his fighting. He was not immediately available for comment.
Doctors think they can restore much of the lung function and expect him to recover. The boy was in serious but stable condition.
Another attending physician, Dr. Carlos Hernandez Sanchez, said Miguel was the youngest goring victim he had ever treated, but he said he did not think the boy was too young to be in the ring.
“These are injuries that happen. He’s a great bullfighter,” Hernandez Sanchez said.
A popular attraction
Juan Carlos Lopez, manager of the Aguascalientes ring, said there have been younger fighters in the ring there, but he would not cite their ages.
Bullfighting is fairly popular in Mexico, though it is far from being a national sport.
Sunday’s accident occurred at the popular San Marcos Fair, where bullfights are one of the main attractions.
In Miguel’s native Spain, an aspiring “torero” must be at least 16 to begin training with small bulls but is not allowed to kill a bull in the ring before he or she is 18, an official from the Royal Bullfighting Federation of Spain said.
But in Mexico, some start as young as 12 or 13, and there appears to be a fad for ever-younger fighters.
In 2005, Rafita Mirabal, then age 8, started in the ring, also in Aguascalientes, a bull-mad city 260 miles northwest of Mexico City. “Rafita,” as he was known, began facing down younger, smaller bulls and calves, but the animals still outweighed him by hundreds of pounds.
