A French cyclist who fell 130-feet into a ravine has survived after three days with nothing but bottles of red wine to drink.
The 77-year-old man had gone to his local supermarket to buy the drinks in the mountainous Cévennes region of France.
During his journey home, the elderly biker missed a bend and careened down a rocky slope near Saint-Julien-des-Points, about 50 miles from Montpellier.
The man landed on the banks of the Gardon River and shouted every time he heard the sound of a passing car, but for several days to no avail.
Then on Tuesday, technicians from the Interdepartmental Roads Directorate who were working on road maintenance heard the man’s cries for help. They spotted the twisted and broken cycle at the bottom of the ravine and came to his aid.
The men called the fire brigade at 2.41pm but ultimately a helicopter had to be dispatched to the Gardon riverbed on the bank opposite.
The pensioner told his rescuers he did not have the strength to climb the steep walls of the mountain and make it back up to the road himself.
The chief medical officer Laurent Savath said the man was doing miraculously well, given his ordeal in a mountainous area with bad weather.
“He is safe and sound,” Mr Savath told French newspaper Le Lozère Nouvelle. “Nevertheless, after such a mishap, he was airlifted to the Alès Hospital Centre for a medical examination,”
Mr Savath said the cyclist’s survival was “a miracle … given the cold and the rain, with almost nothing to eat or drink” other than the wine.
“He is really tough … he fell into a stream several times trying to scramble back up, so was at risk of hypothermia,” he added.
The pensioner had minor injuries and mild hypothermia but is set to fully recover, according to the French news outlet Entrevue.
The Frenchman’s story comes just two weeks after a British teenager was found alive after surviving for 10 days in the Thai jungle eating insects and bark.
Police in Kanchanaburi, launched a full-scale operation to find 19-year-old Lawrence Stallard Honour after he was reported missing by his Thai-Russian mother.
The teenager was eventually reunited with his loved ones after he stumbled across a remote buddhist temple for help.
