There is an age in sport at which everything begins to clear up. One sees better. One understands sooner. The plays arrange themselves in the mind with a cleanness and a precision one did not have in youth.
And yet, it is an age already useless.
In some interviews, the basketball legend Michael Jordan has admitted that today he plays better in his head than when he was active. It is not the boutade of a genius in decline: it is an observation. The intelligence of the game matures when the body begins to withdraw.
There lies the limit of sport.
Because sport, even in its most refined forms, still depends on the physical response. True lucidity arrives when it can no longer be executed.
In bullfighting, it does not happen exactly like that. Or rather, it happens exactly the opposite.
Last 12 October, in Las Ventas, during the festival in homage to Antoñete, Curro Vázquez walked out at an age at which, in any sporting discipline, the gesture would already be written off. And yet he fought as always; that is, he fought better than ever.
But he did not fight "in spite of" his age.
He fought from it.
It is worth pausing on that decisive difference.
Because what was seen there was not a survival of the craft, nor a well-managed nostalgia, nor a sentimental concession from the public. It was something else: an absolute form of clarity. An economy of gesture taken to the extreme. A way of doing in which the body no longer acts as an engine, but as pure surface of appearance.
The veteran bullfighter —when he truly is one— does not compete with his youth. He does not try to recover what is lost. He does not accelerate. He does not accumulate.
He takes away.
He takes away until the gesture is reduced to the indispensable. And in that stripping-down, in that progressive elimination of the superfluous, something appears that was not there before.
Not more faculties. More form.
That is why age, in bullfighting, is not only wear and decline: it can be distillation and fullness.
The right gesture · Zidane and the intelligence of the body
Here it is worth recalling a phrase that Morante de la Puebla is said to have uttered on some occasion, and which his son, a player for Betis, recalled in an interview: "I would like to fight bulls the way Zidane played football."
The comparison, rightly understood, is precise.
Zinedine Zidane's football was not based on physical intensity or the accumulation of actions, but on the management of time and space: an art of the right time. Zidane did not impose his movement: he used the opponent's. He did not respond with more speed: he responded with better positioning. He did not occupy space: he emptied it. He did not run more: he arrived sooner.
His game had something of those Eastern disciplines in which force is not opposed but conducted. Where the adversary is overcome not by collision, but by displacement. Where a minimal gesture, executed at the right instant, is enough to dismantle a whole structure of energy.
There is in certain arts —think of aikido, or of judo in its most refined form— an intelligence of the body that consists not in doing more, but in doing what is necessary at the exact moment. There is no display of power, but adjustment. No squandering, but economy. No added gesture: only the right gesture.
Zidane, at his best, played like that.
And yet, it was still football.
That is, it still depended on a body capable of executing that intelligence with precision. That is why he too had a limit. A moment in which the understanding remained, but the execution began to fail.
Where sport ends and bullfighting begins
Bullfighting, by contrast, pushes that limit far beyond the reasonable. It does not eliminate it —the body is still in play, and how— but it reconfigures it. Because the bullfighter's gesture is measured not by its performance, but by its fitness. Not by its quantity, but by its adjustment. Not by its efficacy in sporting terms, but by its capacity to appear as form.
And that is where Curro Vázquez becomes decisive.
What was seen in Las Ventas on 12 October was not a body that responded, but a body that knew how to withdraw in time. Not a deployment of faculties, but an administration of gesture. Not an affirmation, but a subtraction.
And in that subtraction, in that way of taking away until almost nothing is left, bullfighting held.
That is what sport cannot do.
Not because it is inferior, but because it answers to another logic. That of performance, of measure, of optimisation. Sport needs to produce. Bullfighting, at its extreme, can allow itself to disappear.
That is why there is an age at which the athlete understands better than ever and yet can no longer play.
And there is another —far rarer— in which the bullfighter, when everything seems lost, begins (at last) to fight.
Not better in terms of execution.
Better in terms of truth.
Because he now does almost nothing.
And yet, everything happens in that decisive instant in which the body is sustained by nothing but torería.