The frieze, which includes the fresco described here, depicts the various phases of the bull game. Including the frame, it is 80 cm high and adorns a room above the “courtyard with the stone spout” in the east wing of the New Palace. The frame surrounding the individual panels on all four sides imitates colorful stones. The background in each tableau alternated between yellow and blue. Since in fresco painting, red is almost always used for the skin of men and white for women, we can safely conclude that the bull games were participated in by young men and women, who are otherwise depicted very similarly to each other. In the fresco, we can see that the young female athletes wear several pairs of bracelets, necklaces, two-tone loincloths, and sometimes blue and red bands around their foreheads. Their hairstyles are very neat. It is significant that the young girls faced the deadly game fully adorned. It is very likely that they were young princesses.
The bullfighting process can be imagined as follows: once the bullfighter has managed to grab the bull by the horns, he remains there for some time, holding on tightly. This surprises the animal, which is initially unable to move freely. In these few moments, the other player manages to complete his acrobatic leap over the bull's back.
Note in this depiction that the girl hanging from the bull's horns is grasping the bull's left horn with both right hands. Note the agony of the moment and how the upward-facing and half-covered eyeball expresses the girl's tension.
The question of whether the same person grabbed the horns of the angry animal in the bull games, then completed the salto mortale on its back and finally on the ground behind it, remains unanswered. The action in the Cretan bull game remains unclear to us. These were obviously always unarmed games;
the killing of the animal, which may have been sacred, is never depicted.

(Spyridon Marinatos: Kreta, Thera und das mykenische Hellas, München 1973)