“Still Alive” 35 Years Later on Sunday’s Outside the Lines on ESPN

ESPN Visits Crash Site; Interviews Survivors and Man Who Found Them

December 27, 2007 -- Reporter Chris Connelly and a camera crew spent two weeks in South America interviewing several people, including three survivors and the man who found them after the “Andes Flight Disaster” for the Sunday, Dec. 30 Outside the Lines (ESPN 9:30 a.m. ET, re-aired ESPNEWS at noon).

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Outside the Lines: Still Alive will air the week of the 35th anniversary (December 23, 1972) of when the last survivors were rescued from the October 13, 1972 crash of a charter flight carrying 45 people including the Stella Maris College’s "Old Christians" rugby team, into Argentina’s Andes Mountains. The 72 days experienced by the 16 survivors before their rescue, spent eating the flesh of the dead to avoid starvation and battling, dehydration, frostbite and broken bones from the crash, was recounted in the1993 film Alive.

Survivor Roberto Canessa, from Sunday’s Outside the Lines:

"You feel very sad, very, very sad, and you think, ‘Why do I have to do that?’ Of course it was repugnant when you have to cut the piece of a dead person and eat it, and I thought, if I have to do this to go back to my mother and tell her, ‘Don’t cry anymore, your son is alive,’ I would eat in a second. I didn’t want to cause her this huge pain of dying for a dead son."

“We spent three hours on horseback through the Andes foothills -- like riding a horse on the railing of the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building -- to get to the place where two of the Andes rugby-team survivors were found by the farmer, Sergio Catalan, who is the center of our story,” Connelly says. “The survivors were amazing men, with great careers full of achievements, gorgeous families, and the ability to talk about their experiences in English, which was impressive all in itself. They live lives that are very much of the 21st century, but the man who saved them lives a life straight out of the 19th century. Seeing the rural Chliean world of Sergio Catalan was a revelation to all of us. Seeing the depth of feeling he and the survivors share was a privilege.”

Feature Producer Danny Arruda, who joined ESPN in 2002 after receiving his degree in Radio/Television Journalism at The University of Central Lancashire in England, also went on-site for Sunday’s piece.

“Getting an opportunity to work on this feature, telling what is arguably the greatest survival story of the 20th Century, has been incredibly rewarding,” says Arruda, who joined the United States Army in 1993 and served most of his four years as a medic at N.A.T.O. Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. “Besides meeting the survivors, the most memorable experience was going to the crash site -- my cameraman and I chartered a helicopter and flew to the spot, which was not only visually incredible, seeing the Andes at 14,000 feet, but also seeing the same mountains the survivors did and experiencing a very small slice of what life must have been like for them, gave me a new perspective on the story. Walking just 20 feet in the thin air left me breathless, so I can't imagine how two of them walked off the mountain. After being there, it just doesn't seem possible they were able to spend 71 nights there.”

A three-part Spanish language version of the story debuted on the actual final-rescue anniversary date on ESPN Deportes, the 24-hour, Spanish-language sports network serving the U.S. Hispanic sports fan with more than 1400 live and/or original hours of sports programming annually.

Source: ESPN