It’s the middle of July. There’s no NBA or NHL. NFL training camps are still closed; major league baseball is still on its all-star game hiatus. I know what you’re thinking: How many people have been gored in Pamplona this year?
The answer: Over the course of this year’s nine-day annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain (which ended July 14), nine people were gored.
Good to know, as always. But blogger Hayley Munguia has taken that data, and much more, to a new level of utility. Munguia seeks to answer a more important question: What, exactly, are my chances of getting gored in Pamplona?
Crunching the numbers on deaths going back to 1922 — there have been 15 — and “major injuries” going back to 1980, as well as attendance figures from the City of Pamplona, Munguia found that: (a) injuries have risen a little over 5% each year since 1980; and (b) attendance is on the decline (17,126 people attended last year, down from 20,500 in 2011).
So with injuries rising and attendance falling, each person who runs with the bulls faces a higher risk of injury every year. Based on 2014 data from the Associated Press, Mungia found that a runner last year had a 0.3% chance of being injured.
It gets better. Turns out that the Associated Press data includes the number and nationality of runners who were gored every year since 2005. So we now know that Spaniards were gored the most (well, duh), logging 37 of the total 78 gorings (or 47%) over the 10-year period ending last year.
But in what has to be the data table of the year, Munguia calculates the gorings-to-attendance ratios of the top six nationalities. Our brave British friends topped the list with a score of 1.9; North Americans were at the bottom, barely ahead of the nationality in last place: the French.
