The double face of the Festival, glory and blood, appeared in Las Ventas in Victorino Martín’s bullfight at the Autumn Fair.
Three bullfighters with desire and need for victory, Román, Borja Jiménez and Leo Valadez against bulls from Victorino Martín, a leading livestock farm in the Campo Bravo and an afternoon that, for various reasons and mixed emotions, maintained interest from beginning to end.
And if the Valencian Román paid a tribute of blood on the bull that opened the celebration and from the infirmary, after being operated on, he left – between tears that were not from pain but from rage – to, via ambulance, enter a hospital, Borja Jiménez rightly opened the door to glory, the reward for a very complete afternoon for the Sevillian bullfighter who, now, must also open the door to the offices in all the bullrings.
The other component of the shortlist, the Mexican Leo Valadez, had few options with the least favorable lot of a Victorino bullfight of serious presence, astifines, fairness of forces, some exemplary and unequal behavior, in which he stood out for his fierceness, tamed with value and technique, by Borja Jiménez, the first of his batch, from whom he cut off an ear of enormous merit.
Eight years of alternative, always with the master Spartacus at his side, have tanned the bullfighter and decanted his bullfighting, which has gone from boisterous and courageous in its beginnings to the calm and rest that has been seen today in Las Ventas but for a long time now. couple of years in the – not many – contracts that he has added in the bullfighting geography.
He bullfighted his first bull, saddled, with command in the ring, running his hand along the two pitons with length, swallowing without fuss, very settled, without doubts. Once the bullfighter surrendered, the public surrendered with him, while the bull never surrendered his weapons. The thrust was not the best culmination of the magnitude of what was done but the ear was not discussed.
Nor the one that walked from the fourth, which would have belonged to Román, and which could well have been two if the sword (as happened before and also later in the sixth) had been legal. But the task had had specific weight, facing a bull different in behavior from the previous one, which he always bullfighted clear of ideas. A task culminated with a series of natives from the front that was clamorous.
A porta gayola went to receive the sixth and with him again a great dimension of Borja Jiménez, in a mess that always kept everyone’s attention, among other things because Victorino’s did not allow himself to relax.
Three ears and a big door (like the title of the pasodoble that accompanied it, by Elvira Checa, wife of Luis Maria Gibert, who was a great fighter for bullfighting in Catalonia) of those that, if bullfighting does not prevent it, puts Borja Jiménez in the first line of departure for the 2024 season. And those to come.
