A2 · Elementary
9 min
motorsportpublic safetylatin american culturesports history
The Monster Truck: Sport, Spectacle, and Danger
El Camión Monstruo: Deporte, Espectáculo y Peligro
A monster truck crashes into a crowd at an exhibition event in Popayán, Colombia. Fletcher and Octavio explore the history of motorsport, the culture of public spectacle in Latin America, and the hard question: when is risk too much?
Un camión monstruo choca contra la gente en un evento en Popayán, Colombia. Fletcher y Octavio exploran la historia del deporte motorizado, la cultura de los espectáculos en América Latina, y la pregunta difícil: ¿cuándo el riesgo es demasiado?
5 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| espectáculo | spectacle, show | El partido de fútbol es un espectáculo. |
| peligroso | dangerous | Los camiones monstruo son peligrosos. |
| herido | injured, hurt | Hay treinta y siete personas heridas. |
| reglas | rules | Los eventos grandes tienen muchas reglas. |
| multitud | crowd | La multitud está en el estadio. |
Before we recorded today I was reading about a monster truck that drove into a crowd in Colombia.
Two people dead, thirty-seven injured.
And my first reaction wasn't shock at the monster truck part, which probably tells you something about me.
Los camiones monstruo son muy grandes.
Monster trucks are very large.
Son peligrosos.
They are dangerous.
They are.
The incident happened in Popayán, in the Cauca department, southwest Colombia.
An exhibition event, the kind of thing you see in stadiums and fairgrounds.
The truck lost control and went into the crowd.
Es muy triste.
It is very sad.
Dos personas están muertas.
Two people are dead.
And thirty-seven hurt.
But here's what I want to get into with you, because this is genuinely a sports and culture story as much as it is a tragedy.
Monster truck shows, Octavio, are a billion-dollar industry.
They've been around since the early eighties in the United States.
How much do you know about them?
En España, no hay muchos.
In Spain, there are not many.
Son americanos.
They are American.
Very American.
The first one was a truck called Bigfoot, built by a guy named Bob Chandler in Missouri in 1979.
He just wanted a truck that could drive over other cars.
That's the whole concept.
And somehow it became a sport.
¿Un deporte?
A sport?
No es un deporte normal.
It is not a normal sport.
No, it is absolutely not a normal sport.
But that's what's interesting.
It became Monster Jam by the nineties, a fully organized touring show.
Arenas, merchandise, television contracts.
The trucks weigh around five tons.
The tires alone are about five feet tall.
It looks like something a twelve-year-old drew on a notebook.
Los niños aman los camiones grandes.
Children love big trucks.
Yo comprendo eso.
I understand that.
Every adult does, deep down.
But the question is always safety.
And motorsport has a long, genuinely painful history with that.
Think about Formula 1 in the sixties and seventies.
La Fórmula 1 es diferente.
Formula 1 is different.
Hay muchas reglas ahora.
There are many rules now.
Now, yes.
But it wasn't always.
Before Ayrton Senna died at Imola in 1994, the sport had lost drivers nearly every season.
The changes that came after that, the HANS device, better barriers, the halo, all of it came from tragedy.
Safety in motorsport is written in deaths.
Senna es un héroe en Brasil.
Senna is a hero in Brazil.
En España también.
In Spain too.
He's a hero everywhere.
And there's something worth sitting with there.
We celebrate the speed, the noise, the danger.
That's part of the draw.
Then when someone gets hurt, we're surprised.
Or we pretend to be.
La gente quiere el peligro.
People want danger.
Pero no quiere morir.
But they do not want to die.
That's the exact tension.
You've put it better than most sports philosophers I've read.
The spectator wants to feel the risk from a safe distance.
The problem is that distance isn't always guaranteed.
En Popayán, la distancia no es suficiente.
In Popayán, the distance is not enough.
Clearly not.
And Popayán is worth talking about for a moment on its own terms, separate from the accident.
It's one of the oldest cities in Colombia.
Colonial architecture, historically called the White City because of its whitewashed buildings.
It's also a university town.
Not the first place you'd picture hosting a monster truck show.
Colombia tiene muchas ciudades bonitas.
Colombia has many beautiful cities.
No solo Bogotá.
Not only Bogotá.
I spent a week in Cali once, in the late nineties, and I drove through the Cauca valley.
Stunning country.
But it has also historically been a region with a complicated relationship with conflict and with governance.
Which matters for what we're talking about.
Colombia es diferente ahora.
Colombia is different now.
Hay más paz.
There is more peace.
There is more peace, yes.
The 2016 peace accord with the FARC changed the country in real ways.
And one of the signs of that, honestly, is events like this.
Public gatherings, festivals, shows.
When a region is stable enough for people to come out and watch trucks crush cars, that's something.
La gente quiere diversión.
People want fun.
Eso es normal y bueno.
That is normal and good.
It is good.
But here's where I want to push a little, because in the United States, Monster Jam, the big organized version, has very strict protocols.
Crush zones, certified barriers, drivers who train specifically for crowd proximity.
What happened in Popayán reads more like an informal regional event.
And those are where the accidents happen.
Los eventos pequeños no tienen muchas reglas.
Small events do not have many rules.
Es un problema.
It is a problem.
It's a huge problem, and it's not unique to Colombia.
Think about crowd barriers at racing events in rural Spain forty years ago.
Or the Le Mans disaster in 1955, which is the worst motorsport accident ever.
Eighty-three spectators killed when a car flew into the crowd.
Happened at the most prestigious race in the world, with a paying audience.
¡Ochenta y tres personas!
Eighty-three people!
Eso es horrible.
That is horrible.
Horrifying.
And France, West Germany, Switzerland, they all banned motorsport temporarily after that.
Switzerland didn't lift its ban on circuit racing until 2022.
Nearly seventy years.
Because of one accident.
Suiza no tiene carreras por setenta años.
Switzerland has no racing for seventy years.
No comprendo eso.
I do not understand that.
Neither did the Swiss racing fans.
But it shows you how one catastrophic event can reshape an entire sport's relationship with a country, with a government, with the public.
And the pattern repeats.
Something terrible happens, rules change.
Then memories fade, and corners get cut again.
Las personas olvidan.
People forget.
Eso es un problema humano.
That is a human problem.
A deeply human problem.
I've covered enough wars to know that societies forget faster than we think they should.
The question for Colombia, for Popayán specifically, is whether this accident triggers any kind of regulatory response, or whether it becomes a footnote.
En España, después de un accidente, hay nuevas reglas.
In Spain, after an accident, there are new rules.
Siempre.
Always.
Always in Spain.
Is that always effective, though?
Because there's a difference between writing rules and enforcing them.
Especially at smaller, informal events where the organizers might not even know the rules exist.
Las reglas son importantes.
Rules are important.
Pero la gente necesita aprender.
But people need to learn.
And that takes time and money and political will.
Colombia has been building institutions after decades of conflict.
That's not a small thing.
The country has been trying to become a normal country, where the biggest news out of a place like Popayán is a monster truck accident and not something far worse.
Colombia trabaja mucho.
Colombia works hard.
El futuro es mejor.
The future is better.
I think that's right.
And yet two people are dead in Popayán today, and thirty-seven are in hospitals.
The families of those two people aren't thinking about progress.
They're thinking about who isn't coming home.
That's the reality that stays with me on a story like this.
Sí.
Yes.
Las familias están muy tristes hoy.
The families are very sad today.
One thing I keep turning over: the people who went to that show in Popayán, they went for joy.
That's what these events are.
Noise and fire and huge machines doing impossible things.
There's something completely honest about that kind of joy.
I don't want to lose sight of that even while we're talking about what went wrong.
La alegría y el peligro están juntos.
Joy and danger are together.
Eso es el espectáculo.
That is the spectacle.
That's a clean way to put it.
The spectacle holds both things at once.
Now, you used a word just then that I want to come back to, because you've actually been using it throughout, and I realize I've heard it in a few different contexts during this conversation.
¿Qué palabra?
Which word?
Hay muchas palabras.
There are many words.
"Espectáculo." You've used it to mean the show, the event, the whole concept of spectacle.
In English we borrowed the word from French and it means something slightly more theatrical, slightly grander than a regular show.
Is that the same weight in Spanish?
Sí, "espectáculo" es grande.
Yes, "espectáculo" is grand.
Es especial.
It is special.
No es ordinario.
It is not ordinary.
So if I said "el partido de fútbol es un espectáculo," that's a compliment, not just a description.
I'm saying the game was something to behold.
Exacto.
Exactly.
"El partido es un espectáculo" es muy bueno.
"The match is a spectacle" is very good.
Hay emoción, hay belleza.
There is emotion, there is beauty.
And presumably a monster truck show is the other kind of espectáculo.
Pure sensory spectacle, no elegance required.
Though I have to say, watching a five-ton truck do a backflip over a line of crushed cars, there is a kind of terrible beauty to it.
"Terrible" y "bello" juntos.
"Terrible" and "beautiful" together.
Sí, eso es un buen espectáculo.
Yes, that is a good spectacle.