Bullfighting in Oman
By Ken Haley
Hemingway would have embellished the tail but your humble latter-day scribe can merely report that a day at the bullfights, Omani-style, has excitements unknown to the peons of Andalusia.
The great American novelist might have been challenged by the failure of the Sultanate's variation on the bullfighting theme to pit man against beast, the idea in these parts being that bull fights bull while man, in the form of a handler or two tugging on the leash, acts to restrain aggression rather than incite it.
But 'twixt the idea and the reality, as someone or other noted has observed before me, falls the shadow, and in this case the shadow is cast by a hulking great two-tonne brute that hasn't read the rules and has no intention of playing by them.
Every Friday afternoon in what is laughingly called winter (average temperature 28, average sky colour blue), the owners of these cloven-hoofed Sherman tanks converge on Barka, an hour up the Arabian Sea coast from the capital, or on Seeb, near the international airport, to do battle.
Having been to an Omani bullfight once previously, a decade and a half ago when working in the country, I can tell you that, like traditional sports elsewhere, the game here is being irresistibly affected, for better or worse, by modernising influences.
In the 1980s your typical Brahmin owners arrived at the battlefield - a patch of dirt - with his charge, or charger, literally in tow. Today open-backed utilities debouch their beefy prizefighters outside a low-rise concrete stadium.
Nor is the bullring immune from the ever-encroaching mobile phone: to see a handler struggling to lead a ropeable bull from the arena single-handed, while his 'free' hand clutches a mobile to one ear, is to say you have seen disaster in the making.
The circular arena measures perhaps 150 metres across, but the action is concentrated on a ground-up rectangle in the centre, to which the rivals are led - or, more precisely, dragged - by their handlers.
Around the boundary, the combatants-in-waiting take their stand in the stand, roped-in spectators if ever there were. Iron stakes prevent them from upsetting the order of play, but a volley of unprogrammed bellowings (not to mention even less decorous bodily functions) adds to the ringside atmosphere, and keeps the spectators diverted during lulls in the action.
Bored bulls have their own way of making their feelings known, digging themselves into sand craters that would do a suburban golf course proud.
But - and I'm sure Hemingway would endorse this - it is the bull in the arena, the quadruped in the thick of the action, who snatches the riband of superiority from the mere onlooker every time.
Would that I could recount for you a saga of blood and guts and gore befitting a truly heroic sports contest: truth is, these livestock are too valuable to allow of any mortal combat. A veteran bullfight fan told me that victory in the ring here added nearly $2,000 to a competitor's market value.
Prodded into head-on confrontation, the two bulls indulge in an engrossing tug of war which begins with their locking horns and ends either with a knockout - when one forces the other off the turf - or when one of the opponents turns tail and runs.
Which is what, late in the two-hour card, one of the lumbering beefsteaks decided to do, and "run" scarcely does justice to what ensued.
Fed up with the spectacle at close quarters, this Taurus not only turned his rump on the whole affair but gave his handlers the slip and charged straight for the perimeter, gathering ferocity and velocity as he raged around the fence in what could have been a victory lap (except that he was a loser with a mean streak) but what was, in fact, a frenzied quest for liberty.
That he found it, in the form of the stadium's only exit, I am perfectly well placed to relate, as I had taken up my spectating position just one life-saving metre to the right of the gap, spying which Taurus leapt an equivalent distance off the ground and scrambled down the embankment, in less time than it takes to tell, a grey blur that left no time to be frightened but plenty of leisure to reflect what a prescient stadium architect it was who had placed a bull bar in front of the crowd at just the height that would repel an enraged bull lacking Taurus' keen eyesight.
And what an adrenalin rush afterwards! But me no butts, it was the unquestioned highlight of our day out. To think that, only minutes before, we had been lamenting the fact that the action was taking place a little far away to follow the to and fro of the battle in detail.
Taurus' dash for freedom was as short-lived as it was spectacular. Shortly afterwards one of his 'controllers' (this was a three-handler bull, make no mistake) was seen to grab his tail and hold on for dear life. Trying to shrug off the interception, Taurus dragged him prone over a sand dune, raising a cloud of dust, which obscured them both.
Oman Observer 3rd March 2002
