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For a bull, this one was on the smallish side, at just over a tonne. And its name, Capuchino, sounded harmless enough, like coffee with frothy milk.

But of the things that can go wrong when hordes of humans sprint with thundering beasts at Spain's most storied fiesta, the light brown bull did one of the most dangerous, straying from the pack, spooking and charging at anything that moved.

The rogue bull gored a young Spaniard in the neck on Friday, the first fatality in nearly 15 years at Pamplona's running of the bulls. The victim was killed almost instantly as he scurried for cover under a wooden barrier, sliding under it feet-first.

Had he dived headfirst, the experienced bull runner and son of a Pamplona native would probably still be alive.

Nineteen people had been injured after the sixth of eight planned runs on Sunday, illustrating the festival's extraordinary drawing power and global lure.

Two Spanish men suffered injuries to the neck, chest and buttocks when they were gored on Sunday and two more Spaniards were gored in the chest and buttocks during the run and five other Spaniards were taken to hospital after sustaining various injuries.

Among the injured from earlier runs were two were Americans in their 60s, one of whom suffered a blow to the chest, a Londoner aged 20, and another a young man from Argentina.

The party went on despite Friday's death, the 15th since record keeping began in 1924. The running of the bulls - made famous by Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises - has never been suspended just because someone has died in the mad, 850-metre dash from a holding pen to the city's bull ring.

There, the same six bulls that run in the cool of the morning over cobblestone streets face off against matadors and the prospect of almost certain death in the afternoon. Ironically, on Friday, Capuchino was scheduled to go first.

The Running of the Bulls (in Spanish encierro, from the verb encerrar, to lock/shut up, to pen) is a practice that involves running in front of bulls that have been let loose on a course of a sectioned-off subset of a town's streets. The most famous running of the bulls is that of the nine-day festival of San Fermín in Pamplona (Province Navarra), although they are held in towns and villages across Spain and in some cities in Mexico and southern France, during the summer. Unlike bullfights, which are performed by professionals, anyone may participate in an encierro.
The purpose of this event is the transport of the bulls from the off-site corrals where they had spent the night, to the bullring where they would be killed in the evening. Youngsters would jump among them to show off their bravado.
Injuries are common to the participants who may be gored or trampled, and to the bulls, whose hooves grip poorly on the paved or cobbled street surfaces. (wikipedia)

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