We'll Miss You Bud Greenspan

I'm aware of the fact that most of you have no idea who Bud Greenspan is.  But to us Olympic nuts, his name is as familiar as those of Carl Lewis, Jesse Owens and Michael Phelps.  I was never able to move from one Olympics to the next until Greenspan's documentary premiered a few months later, officially closing the book on that Games.  Sadly, the Vancouver 2010 documentary will be his last.  Greenspan passed away on Sunday.

Greenspan made more than 30 documentaries during his long career, most about the Olympics, including a "recap" film about every Games from Los Angeles 1984 until Vancouver 2010, which isn't out yet but will be released soon.  He also produced several Olympic specials like "100 Years of Olympic Glory" prior to the 1996 Atlanta Games and "The 1972 Munich Olympic Games: Bud Greenspan Remembers." 

The thing that made these films so special is that he looked at the Olympics in a completely different perspective as most other people.  For example, the 1994 Lillehammer Games were about the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan saga for most.  The only figure skating story in Greenspan's film, though, was about Torvill and Dean returning to the Olympic arena after 10 years and winning the bronze medal.  The 2008 Games were all about Michael Phelps.  Greenspan didn't even feature swimming in his Beijing documentary.  Instead, he had stories about water polo player Brenda Villa and the rivalry between hurdlers Dawn Harper and Lolo Jones.

When a non-sports event became an important part of an Olympics (like the Israeli hostage crisis in Munich), Greenspan did his job as a reporter and included it in his documentary about that Games.  But he never included the scandalous stories that took over all of the media attention at a given Olympics, but were really an insignificant story in the grand scope of the Games.  (He never touched on the pairs skating controversy in Salt Lake City or the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing, and the 1980-84 boycotts are only mentioned to provide context.)

Instead, Greenspan focused on the human stories that are at the heart of any Olympics.  Like marathoner Joaish Thugwane, who in Atlanta became the first black South African ever to win an Olympic gold medal, or the heartwarming story of Tanzanian marathoner John Stephen Ahkwari in Mexico City in 1968.  Ahkwari finished last, more than an hour after the gold medalist.  When asked why he didn't quit, Ahkwari said, "My country didn't send me 10,000 miles to start a race.  They sent me 10,000 miles to finish one."  Greenspan always said that was one of his favorite stories throughout his more than 60 years of covering the Olympics.  Those are the stories that made Bud Greenspan's work stand out, and what made it so brilliant.

I can't wait to see what's in store for his final work, the stories of Vancouver 2010.  I also can't believe that there will never be another Bud Greenspan Olympic documentary after that one. 

Juan Antonio Samarach and now Bud Greenspan.  The Olympic movement lost two great men in 2010.