Mauro Prosperi

Prosperi was born in the Italian capital city of Rome on July 13, 1955.  [1]

One year prior to graduating from his secondary school, a Liceo Artistico (an Italian secondary school focused on the study of art subjects) in 1974, Prosperi began working for the Polizia di Stato (the national police force of Italy) as a crowd-control Police Officer.[10]

Prosperi met his wife Cinzia Pagliara at a Pre-Olympic pentathlon event, where Pagliara was working as an English and Russian language interpreter.[2] In an interview with Netflix in 2019, Pagliara noted that she admired Prosperi’s positivity and enthusiasm towards overcoming challenges and obstacles at the event.[2] Within six months, the pair had married, and now have three children together, Silvia, Claudia and Matteo.[2] However, in a 2014 interview with the BBC News Program, Prosperi noted that his marriage with Pagliara had ended, largely due to the nature of his lifestyle.[11]

In 1984, Prosperi competed in the Modern Pentathlon, as part of the Italian Olympic team, at the Summer Olympics held in Los Angeles.  [1]

Following this achievement, he retired from competing in Modern Pentathlons. [2]

Prosperi was first informed of the Marathon Des Sables by a friend of seven years, and fellow running enthusiast Giovanni Manzo, who entertained the idea that they compete in the 156 mile long race together.[2] Keen to challenge himself and drawn towards a new environment of the Sahara Desert, Prosperi began preparing, by running forty kilometres daily, and reducing his drinking water intake, in aims to acclimatise his body to the feeling of dehydration.[1][2] His wife, although never preventing Prosperi from competing, expressed her concerns, due to the extreme nature of the event.[11]

Starting in Foum Zguid, Morocco on April 10, 1994, a thirty-nine year old Prosperi set off with Manzo, amongst eighty other runners, to compete in the ultramarathon, his first desert event.[2] During the first three days of the marathon, Prosperi and Manzo covered 60 miles of terrain composed of salt beds, rock surfaces and sand dunes.[12] All competitors began running together in the morning, yet due to the small number of participants and differing paces of each individual, each person was running almost entirely alone.[2] Abiding to race regulations, Prosperi navigated the desert in a self contained fashion, carrying his own supplies of food, clothing, sleeping bag, compass, portable stove and emergency kit with a signal flare within his backpack, whereas water was supplied at race checkpoint stations.[12]

Competitors running the Marathon des Sables

By April 14, the fourth and longest leg of the marathon, spanning over 53 miles,[2] Prosperi had maintained momentum. By early afternoon, he had left Manzo behind and increased his pace, to rank in a position of fourth place.[2] Temperatures that day had peaked at one hundred and fifteen degrees Fahrenheit.[2] Due to the intensity of the sun’s rays upon the sand, Prosperi experienced a rise in heated surface air, which in return created swirling winds that were able to travel at rapid speeds, due to the large expanse of the desert.[12] Feeling the increasing effect of the wind, at twenty miles into that day’s run, he began to cut across small sand dunes to increase his pace.[2] However, stronger gusts of air began to lift the smaller dunes, clouding Prosperi’s vision and amounting to a severe sandstorm. In fear of being submerged by the sand if he remained stationary, Prosperi continued to run for the entirety of the storm, which lasted eight hours, determined he was able to see the marathon trail.[1] In an interview with Men’s Journal Magazine in 1998, Prosperi said :

“When the sandstorm started to blow, I lost sight of everybody else. I kept running, though, because I thought I could see the trail. I was in seventh place and didn’t want to lose my standing. It was nearly dark before the winds relented. I started running again, but after a few minutes it occurred to me that I had lost the trail.”[10]

Due to the intensity of the windblown sand grains upon his skin, Prosperi experienced bleeding within his nose and injury in his throat, whilst breathing in the particles of sand.[12] It was not until that evening, following the storm’s passing, that he stopped to rest by sheltering in a bush and covering his face with a towel.[2]

Sahara Desert

The following morning, the winds had halted. He awoke and continued to run for four hours, convinced he would find other competitors of the race.[13] However, following a climb to the summit of a tall dune, Prosperi was unable to identify any other participants, and furthermore realised that all signs and landmarks indicating the race trail had disappeared following the storm.[12][1] By this time he also noted the liquid in his water bottle depleting and attempted to drink the remaining water in his bottle as slowly as he could.[1] This method however, was not sufficient to maintain his hydration levels. Remembering a war tale from his grandfather’s experience as a soldier, Prosperi began recycling his fluids by urinating in his spare water bottle.[1]

Abiding to race regulation that advised competitors to remain stationary and await rescue, he awaited assistance.[4] It was not until sunset that he noticed a low flying helicopter, on loan to Marathon coordinators by the Morocccan Police,[1] approaching his direction. He presumably believed it was sent in his search. In attempts to capture the pilot’s attention, he fired a small flare into the air. However, he was unsuccessful.[12]

Rescue and recovery

The young girl returned with her grandmother, who led him towards a Berber Tent in the Tuareg Camp.[3] After being tended to by a group of Tuareg women who served him mint tea and a cup of goat’s milk, Prosperi was offered food, yet he was unable to digest it and threw up.[12] He was first loaded onto a camel for several hours, by the camp’s Tuareg men who took him to the nearest village.[10] There, Prosperi was turned over to a patrol of military police who blindfolded him, in suspicion he may have been a Moroccan spy.[10] Once transported to a military base and interrogated, Prosperi was identified and taken to a hospital in Tindouf.[1]

An image of a Tuareg family in 1907.

Prosperi had wandered 180 miles off-course from the marathon track, traversing the Jebel Bani Mountain range and unknowingly across the Moroccan border into Algeria.[13][10][1] He remained at the infirmary in Algeria for seven days, during which he called his wife who presumed he was dead.[10]

During his disappearance, Prosperi’s brother and brother-in-law had flown from Italy to join marathon organisers, the Moroccan Military and Bedouin trackers, in search of him.[1] Coordinators of the Marathon des Sables were dispatched to search the race trail with Land Rovers, whilst pilots conducted a flyover in an ultralight craft.[10] Whilst they discovered traces of Prosperi’s route that he had intentionally left behind, they were unable to find him.[12] Searchers also reached the Marabout, identifying signs of Prosperi’s time in the shrine.[10] Despite these traces, searchers presumed Prosperi’s death, convinced they were in search of his corpse.[1]

Doctors reported a weight loss of 33 pounds for Prosperi, and that 16 litres of intravenous fluids were required to replenish his water loss.[13][14] He suffered damage to his liver, disabling him from digesting food and causing him to eat soup, liquids and food ground up by a blender for months.[14] Prosperi experienced severe leg cramps for a year and his kidneys experienced permanent damage.[13] It took almost two years for Prosperi to recover.[10][14] After recovering for seven days in Algerian hospitals, Prosperi returned to Rome.[10] He was reunited with his family and received a welcoming return home.[3] Prosperi was interviewed as his story was told in newspaper articles and photographed with Italian dignitaries.[10]

Running the Marathon des Sables

Following his disappearance, race regulations of the Marathon des Sables were altered to ensure participants’ safety was improved. Runners are now equipped with heavier and larger distress flares, to be used in cases of disorientation.[13]

Prosperi has since returned to the Marathon Des Sables six times, notably placing 13th in 2001.[4][5] He has said that once he starts something, he wants to finish it.[1][2] Prosperi has also expressed his love for the desert, saying he is drawn to experiencing it every year.[10] He has stated that sport and nature are significant parts of his life, and that these races allow him to experience these aspects first-hand.[1]

“I feel a connection there,” he said. “I love the clarity. And you see, the Sahara spared my life. Those days in the desert were my happiest.” [10]

Public reception to Prosperi’s story is polarized, largely due to his portrayal within the media.[10] Following his return to Italy, Prosperi was celebrated widely as the man who had come back from the dead, and named “the Robinson Crusoe of the Sahara”.[3][10] Despite this, several sports physiologists have questioned the medical viability of his account, with some saying Prosperi exacerbated or staged the occurrence for fame.[10][3] In 1998, Marathon Des Sables founder Patrick Bauer told Men’s Journal that Prosperi’s story was a fabrication, saying :

“Don’t listen to Mr. Prosperi, his story is a fabrication. He will have you believe he is Superman. It is physiologically impossible for a man to travel more than 200 kilometers in the desert without water. This is a supernatural act. It’s possible that he got genuinely lost for a few days. But all the rest rings false. We believe that early on he was picked up by someone. And then he decided to hide out for a while.[10] “He thought he could make a killing out of this if he prolonged his ordeal. He thought he could sell his story to the tabloids. He aspired to be the star of his own movie.”[10]

Following the publications of these stories, Prosperi considered a lawsuit against Bauer.[3][10] Amongst other concerns, Prosperi intended to sue Bauer, claiming the marathon trail was poorly marked.[10] However, Bauer was never legally prosecuted, as Prosperi believed the dispute to be a personal rather than legal matter.[3][10]

In 1995, a Roman film crew retraced Prosperi’s steps for a reenactment documentary of his survival.[10] The filming crew located the Marabout shrine in which Prosperi rested and discovered some of his possessions, along with several bat skeletons.[10]

Logo of the film The Revenant

In 2004, Prosperi’s survival story was depicted on the National Geographic Channel in a documentary titled Expeditions To The Edge: Sahara Nightmare, and within Episode 5 Lost in the Desert, of the 2019 Netflix series Losers.[15][2] In 2014, British adventurer and survival instructor Bear Grylls also drew influence from Prosperi’s survival in the Sahara Desert, within an episode of his six-part Discovery Channel series Bear Grylls : Escape from Hell.[7] The third episode of the series, entitled ‘Desert’ follows Grylls re-creating aspects of Prosperi’s survival story.[7] Prosperi’s story of endurance was also broadcast in a promotional campaign by 20th Century Fox in December 2015, in support of the American drama film The Revenant, released the same year.[8] The campaign was promoted on the film studio's Youtube channel and entitled ‘The Revenant | Shouldn't Be Alive: Mauro Prosperi’.[8] In May 2020, Prosperi published his book, written in the Italian language, alongside his former wife and co-author Cinzia Pagliara, entitled “Quei 10 Giorni Oltre la Vita” (Those 10 Days Beyond Life).[9]