Yesterday we described how Irish Examiner rugby analyst Donal Lenihan travelled to South America for the meeting of a lifetime with Nando Parrado, a defiant survivor of the Uruguayan rugby team which crashed in the Andes 35 years ago this week.

It’s not given to many men to meet their lifelong hero and inspiration. On the eve of the Rugby World Cup Final, the Irish Examiner’s Donal Lenihan tells the story for the first time of a journey which took him from the Christian Brothers College in Cork in 1972 to breakfast in the Emperador Hotel in Buenos Aires to interview one off the world’s great survivors.