Jaime Ostos, a right-hander very punished by bulls. /
The right-hander dies of a heart attack at the age of 90 during a family trip in Bogotá (Colombia)
The bullfighter Jaime Ostos (Écija, 1931) died this Saturday at the age of 90 due to a heart attack in Bogotá (Colombia), where he was on a family trip. His wife, María de los Ángeles Grajal, who accompanied the right-hander, confirmed his death at the El Country Clinic in Bogotá. Very mistreated by the bulls –they came to give him the last rites in 1963 after a goring in Tarazona–, he stood out for his courage and breed. Master of the technique and skilled with the crutch, he was a dedicated man in the arena, always skirting the edge of the shaft, which cost him many catches. It was not by chance that some called him the killer of the 25 goring. Other ‘Lion Heart’. One of the worst drinks of his life was covid, a disease that left him in the bones and weighing 45 kilos.
In 1956 he took the alternative in Zaragoza together with his countryman Bartolomé Jiménez Torres, with whom he maintained a bitter rivalry in the arena. The antagonism reached such a point that Écija divided into two camps: “jaimistas” and “bartolistas.” The ceremony took place at the Feria del Pilar in Zaragoza by Litri and in the presence of Antonio Ordóñez, with bulls from Urquijo.
He climbed to the top of the ladder in 1959 and 1962. He did not allow himself to be beaten fair and square. Jean Cau, writer and secretary of Jean Paul Sartre, recounted what he snapped at the other matadors, before the parade: «If there is anyone who wants to follow me, I warn them that I am here. Today I’m going to cut ears! ”
He lived closely the rivalry of Luis Miguel and Antonio Ordóñez. They were very different. Luis Miguel was more powerful, very human; he had great presence and personality. Antonio Ordóñez was more of an artist, but if he didn’t like a bull, he didn’t know how to hide it ».
A friend of Ernest Hemingway, the novelist once told him that he would have felt a complete man if he had walked through the Prince’s Gate on his shoulders. “Again, in Pamplona, he told me that he was going to run the confinement and ended up going to drink a bottle of wine … He had a weakness for Ordóñez.”
He was accompanied by a formidable gang, made up of the banderilleros El Vito, Luis González and Pepe Blanco; and the picadors Curro Toro and Cipriano Velázquez. He boasted that the one who was least with him lasted 23 seasons.
Five liters of blood
He suffered a very serious goring in Tarazona de Aragón, on July 17, 1963. He lost more than five liters of blood and underwent life or death surgery. When summoning the natural, the strong wind lifted his crutch, exposing him. The bull gave him a dry gored, in the lower abdomen.
The chronicles of that time account that Ángel Peralta tried to stop the blood coming out with a sheet, while two hundred people lined up in front of the infirmary to donate blood. I was bloodless. His tension became 1.8. «I heard through the door of my room the conversation of the doctors, who did not give me hope of life … When I began to improve, I had a ninety percent chance of losing my leg. It was very strong, “he told Andrés Amorós in an interview.
He prided himself on never having used the lying sword, not even in the temptations. «Once, in El Puerto, I suffered a wound on my finger and Antonio Ordóñez gave me his wooden sword. In the first crutch, the bull, in a defeat, broke it: I did not know how to use it, I was not used to it ».
Ostos never lost his warmth and his authenticity before the bull, but with that ‘Nevado’ from Tarazona, who broke his iliac and was about to steal his life, he saw the wrinkles to death. That ‘Nevado’, that’s what the bull was called, he will remember him all his life. «I floated in a world of clouds of different colors that I have never seen in reality: not in paint, not in the field, not in the sky. Very vivid phosphorescent lights, mixed with a very strong light », he related to Luis Nieto in his ‘Bullfighting anecdotario’.
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