Female Matador Has Lots To Dodge

JACA, Spain - It's not easy being a bullfighter. And it's especially not easy being bullfighter Cristina Sanchez, who last spring became Europe's first woman matador.

While crowds in Spain and France have been encouraging, and frequently adoring, Sanchez - who is 24, blond and has the sturdy haunches of a professional ballplayer - has been struggling. She encounters sexist attitudes from men bullfighters, barbs from critics and corny questions from journalists who ask whether she isn't worried that her job might scare away dates.

Sometimes it seems as if the whole future of women's bullfighting is on her shoulders, Sanchez said. "It's a great responsibility for me," she said in a recent interview. "I have to do it all the best."

That symbolic role would be less of a problem if Sanchez were a great bullfighter.

While widely regarded as a brave, elegant torero who moves her body and cape in a beautifully classic manner, Sanchez is a near failure when it comes to the kill - something akin to an American football player who runs brilliantly but rarely scores a touchdown.

Ideally, bulls should be dispatched with a single, strong, purposeful lunge of the sword straight into the back of the neck. But as often as not, as it did here frequently in Jaca, Sanchez's sword goes pinging off the beast's hide.

In the succinct words of bullfighting critic Joaquin Vidal of the Spanish daily newspaper El Pais: "What a good bullfighter is

Cristina Sanchez, and what a bad killer."

It's not due to reluctance on her part, say Sanchez and her manager Simon Casas; she just needs more practice. When she killed her first young bull as a teenager, Sanchez recalled, "I thought I was the greatest woman in the world."

As for her unique job, she said she could not imagine giving it up, at least for another four to five years, after which she hopes to switch to a career in business. For now, said the young matador, "I need this in order to live. It's like a drug."

And like a drug, it's extremely dangerous: As a novice, or novillero, Sanchez was gored deeply in her lower abdomen in September 1992, a feeling she described in the European newspaper as "a very fast kind of boom-ya as you're knocked off your feet."

In good form this year and with no injuries yet, Sanchez said she expected to fight in about 70 events in Spain, France, Mexico and South America. She hopes to earn about $1.6 million for one season's work, she said. Not bad for a woman who came this close to a career in hairdressing.

Should women fight bulls?

The late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco thought not, and he banned women from appearing in the ring on foot from 1939 to 1974 - although he did allow them to confront bulls from the relative safety of a horse's back. Even under such repression, two Spanish women managed to attain the full rank of matador de toros - killer of bulls - along with two women from Mexico and Colombia. But they had to do their fighting in South America.

In the lower ranks of novice bullfighting, where the bulls are younger and smaller but still deadly, there have been at least 500 women toreros - or bullfighters - over the centuries. (A purist would use the feminine term, toreras, a word Sanchez dislikes when it is applied to her. So don't call her a torera.)

There have been women fighters "from the very beginning, from a woman who fought at the end of the 17th century on horseback to one woman better known in 1749 all the way until today," said Madrid bullfighting expert Muriel Feiner, an American who has written the definitive book on women matadors, "Women in the World of the Bulls."

There are at least five young women now in training at Madrid's prestigious bullfighting school, La Escuela de Tauromaquia.

But until Sanchez came into her own, no woman had faced the full-size toros, which weigh up to 1,000 pounds, on European soil. Her alternativa, the poignant ceremony that marks a young bullfighter's rise to professional ranks, took place in a bullring in Nimes, France, on May 25.

At the ceremony, veteran bullfighter Curro Romero handed her his sword and his cape, and said: "I am old, Cristina, and have acted in several alternativas, but no other has moved me as much as this one." It was only logical, he added, that women fight bulls, because "women caress better than men, and as you are aware a bull must be caressed."

But not everyone has been so supportive.

Spanish bullfighting star Jesulin de Ubrique, a matador heartthrob who sometimes fights for women-only audiences, has said he would never appear in the ring with a woman bullfighter. There have been grumblings from other men fighters, whom Sanchez declines to name.

When she hears about those attitudes, "It's like I have demons inside of me (wanting to scream), `I can do it!' " Sanchez said, as she sat tensely in her spare hotel room before a recent fight in this northern Spanish city. But her only weapons, she added, are the ones that count: "My cape and my sword."

Sanchez can't remember the precise moment when she decided to become a matador. "It's not because of a day, or a person, or because of a special bull," she said.

One influence was her father, Antonio, an undistinguished matador who dropped down the bullfighting ladder to become a banderillero - the person who rushes toward the bull on foot to stick frilly ended barbs in its neck. (The barbs help weaken and lower the bull's neck, making it easier to kill.) Sanchez's father has frequently worked beside her in the ring.

As a little girl, Sanchez watched her father fight. She was sitting in the stands when he was gored several times; but that didn't frighten her away, and by age 12 or 13 she had started hanging out inside the ring. By her mid-teens she had begun training with small bulls.

Her father tried to talk her out of it. "I tried to get the idea out of her head," said the elder Sanchez, who is small and compact like his daughter and who watches her bullfights with great pride. "(I told her) you have to know that bullfighting is very difficult - sometimes impossible - for a man, so for a woman, it will be more difficult."

But the passion, as Cristina calls it, had taken hold.

She took up hairdressing for a while, hated it and then enrolled in Madrid's bullfighting school, "where I was very well treated, not better, not worse, than the boys." She graduated in 1992 at the top of her class and hit the circuit as one of Spain's most popular and respected novice fighters.

Now a full-fledged professional, she still draws big crowds, although some observers say her novelty could soon wear off. Sanchez, who lives at home with her father and mother, Maria Carmen, a worker at a leather factory, and three sisters in suburban Madrid, is hoping that ultimately it will be her talent, not her sex, that keeps winning her lucrative bullfighting contracts.

Although "she has totally assumed the mentality, the language, the attitude of a professional," said bullfighting expert William Lyon, an American who lives in Madrid, "there is just not that greatness, that spark, that personality." If she were a man with the same skills, he said, "you wouldn't have heard of her."

It's not that women shouldn't be fighting bulls, Lyon added. "When you look at the positions (matadors) are assuming, it's almost graceful, like a ballet - in a woman these are more graceful, more feminine and more natural positions," he observed.

Sanchez takes pains during interviews to emphasize her femininity, calling herself "a woman on the outside of the ring, a bullfighter on the inside." Outside the ring, she wears tight jeans, shiny lip gloss and unpins her pale yellow hair to let it flow about her face. "I'm nothing about macho," she said after her fight in Jaca. "I just have a sensibility for bullfighting."

The European media seems bemused by her. A recent Times of London article about Sanchez was headlined: "Beauty and the Beast, Lipstick in the Afternoon for Spain's Brave new Matadora."

And Paris Match, the French equivalent of Look magazine, dressed her in a Christian Dior gown and asked her questions like: "Aren't you afraid of frightening men?"