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Murphy's Law Running of the fools
Dear Bulls: Obviously, it was beneath your dignity to be forced to mingle with such a drunken, clueless rabble. Sorry about that. Rain-slicked cobblestones and, I don't know, maybe the fact that they'd been drinking all night, caused some runners to fall down in the path of the snuffling, one-ton beasts, who, miraculously, didn't kill anyone. "I'm a fast runner," goring victim Jamie Massie told the Toronto Sun, "but they can catch up to [anyone], no problem." That knowledge might have served you better, Jamie, before you decided to engage them in a footrace. This is not to imply that running with enraged bovines while one's blood-alcohol level hovers in the neighborhood of Rey Ordoñez's batting average, is a sport. However, the injuries the bulls inflicted do have something in common with many of those suffered by mainstream adventure athletes: They are unnecessary, preventable and the result of sheer stupidity. While the bulls played Hacky Sack with those fools in Pamplona, a search party of roughly 100 people combed California's Stanislaus National Forest. They were looking for Eric Tucker, an intermediate hiker who'd decided to trek solo some 50 miles through the Sierra Nevada mountains. On June 27, his first day on the trail, Tucker got lost and broke his left ankle. Things went downhill from there. The good news is that he's O.K.: He limped out of the woods on July 11. The bad news is that five searchers were injured when their helicopter crashed while they were looking for him. "One thing we stress," says David Kovar, a search and rescue volunteer from Cupertino, Calif., "is that there are consequences to your actions. When you get lost, you put other people at risk." That's what happened when hiker John Devine, who was 73 and blind in one eye, attempted to summit a peak in Washington's Buckhorn Wilderness Area in 1997. When he didn't return for several days, rescuers went looking for him in helicopters. A chopper went down, three rescuers died and Devine was never found. Two years ago Kovar was part of the First Response Group, an elite search and rescue squad that helped find Robert Bogucki, an Alaska firefighter who sauntered off on a solo, soul-searching trip into Australia's Great Sandy Desert and wound up lost for 42 days. From his hospital bed on the day of his rescue, Bogucki told an Aussie TV crew, "I do feel satisfied that I've scratched that itch." Oh, sure, he'd necessitated rescue efforts that cost a small fortune -- but, hey, at least he scratched his itch! Even if you are the only one injured, you have the power to give an entire sport a black eye. Take BASE-jumping, whose practitioners parachute from Buildings, Antennas, Spans and Earth, and have long sought to have their extreme sport legalized in national parks, where it is forbidden. Gosh, wonder why? In 1999 a BASE-jumper named Frank Gambalie executed a successful jump off the 3,500-foot face of Yosemite's El Capitan. When park rangers pursued him, Gambalie fled -- into the Merced River, in which he drowned. That, Alanis Morissette, is ironic. Outraged at what they saw as his persecution, Gambalie's BASE-jumping peers organized a demonstration. They would prove to the world the safeness of their sport. Three jumpers leaped from El Cap, all three landing safely. Then it was Jan Davis's turn. Because she didn't want rangers to confiscate her rig, she borrowed someone else's chute -- a cardinal sin in BASE-jumping. As TV cameras rolled, the chute never opened and the 60-year-old grandmother hit the talus slope at the base of El Cap going 120 mph. One ingredient of Greek drama is the inevitability of tragedy. It need not be so in the great outdoors. We can manage our risk. We can elect to not ski out-of-bounds, especially on days when there is an avalanche risk. We can decide not to skydive at night, not to go free diving alone. We can get off the streets when we know that some very unhappy bulls are headed our way. The author, an incorrigible outdoor sports junkie and Sports Illustrated senior writer, muses on sundry subjects adventure-related. Issue date: July 23, 2001 For more news, notes and features from the world of adventure sports, call toll free to order SI Adventure at 1-888-394-5427.
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