A crowd of attendees of a bullfight in Portugal were shocked when a bull gored a young, up-and-coming bullfighter to death right in front of them.
Manuel María Trindade was a promising new personality in the bullfighting scene when he entered the ring on Friday for his debut performance in Lisbon’s Campo Pequeno, The U.S. Sun reports.
Trindade was attempting to perform a pega de cara, or a “face catch,” where the bullfighter goads a bull into charging and then he grabs the animal by the face for a short ride across the ring before being joined by his crew to wrestle the animal to a halt. It is a feat of daring and a defiance of death.
But the performance went horribly wrong, and the bull seriously injured the 22-year-old novice bullfighter.
According to reports, he was gored and bashed by the bull, with the bashing causing brain damage. He reportedly died on Saturday morning at the São José Hospital in Lisbon.
The young bullfighter was not the only one to die during that fateful evening. A spectator in the stands also died during the disastrous performance.
Vasco Morais Batista, an elderly man from the Aveiro region, reportedly died of a fatal aortic aneurysm at the same time, according to the Daily Mail.
Trindade was a rising star among Portuguese forcados. A forcado is a bullfighter who purposefully provokes a bull and then, with a crew of several others, wrestles the animal to a stand still.
Portuguese bullfighting differs from Spanish-style events because the forcados do not kill the bull in the ring; this is thanks to a law passed in 1836 that banned the slaughter of the animals for sport.
Trindade was continuing his family tradition of bullfighting, as his father was also a forcado.
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