Forty years on, Andes crash survivors get to play the rugby match Surviving members of a Uruguayan rugby team have played a match postponed four decades ago when their plane crashed in the Andes, stranding them for 72 days and forcing them to eat human flesh to stay alive. The Old Christians Club squared off on Saturday in Santiago against the Old Grangonian Club, the former Chilean rugby team they were supposed to play when their flight went down. Their terrifying story became the basis of a best-selling book and a Hollywood movie. At about this time we were falling in the Andes. Today, we're here to win a game," crash survivor Pedro Algorta, 61, said as he prepared to walk onto the playing field surrounded by the jagged mountains that trapped the group. During the anniversary ceremony, military jets flew over the field, where parachutists draped in Chilean and Uruguayan flags landed. In a corner, survivors wept when officials unveiled a commemorative frame with pictures of those who died. "The conditions were more horrifying than you can ever imagine," said survivor Eduardo Strauch, 65. The Uruguayan air force plane that carried the team crashed in a mountain pass in October 1972 while en route from Montevideo to Santiago. Of the 45 passengers aboard, 16 survived by feeding on dead family members and friends preserved in the snow. "I think the greatest sadness I felt in my life was when I had to eat a dead body," said Roberto Canessa, 59, who was a teenage medical student at the time of the crash. I would ask myself: Is it worth doing this? And it was because it was in order to live and preserve life, which is exactly what I would have liked for myself if it had been my body that lay on the floor," he said Desperate after more than two months in the frigid peaks, Mr Canessa and Fernando Parrado left the crash site to seek help. It was the group's last attempt at survival. After ten days of trekking, they spotted Sergio Catalan, a herdsman in the foothills of the Chilean Andes. Mr Catalan, who at the time rode his horse to the nearest town to alert rescuers, returned to meet the survivors on Saturday in a hat and poncho. He walked slowly this time with the aid of a cane and pointed at the sky when helicopters hovered over the field just as they did 40 years ago over the barren mountains. "I came back to life after having died," said Mr Parrado, whose mother and sister died in the Andes. It's something that very few people experience. His experience, he said, scarred him but made him stronger and brought him a new found appreciation for life. Survivor Daniel Fernandez, 66, held the trophy that would have been the reward for the game to be played the day of the crash. The ordeal "taught me that we set our own limits," Fernandez said. "If I had been told: "I'm going to leave you in a mountain 4,000 meters high, 20 degrees below zero in shirtsleeves, I would have said I'd last ten minutes." Instead, I lasted 72 days.