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Legendary documentarian Bud Greenspan dies

His camera restlessly documented athletic achievement and the search for the personal best. Legendary film documentarian Bud Greenspan, best known for his films on the Olympic Games, has died. He was 84.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Greenspan began his career in sports radio broadcasting in the mid-1940s and then picked up his camera ten years later. His first documentary to attract widespread attention was his 1964 film, "Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin," dealt with the American black athlete's triumph in Nazi Germany, visibly unseating Adolph Hitler's twisted notion of a "master race."

"Jesse Owens" and Greenspan's 21 other films that made up the series "The Olympiad" garnered him an Emmy Award in 1976. Greenspan went on to make numerous other films, including docudramas. He also authored several books about the Olympics.

"I am feeling a terrible loss," Norm Bellingham, chief operating officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee and an Olympic gold medalist.

"I was just thinking of him this morning -- looking through the many Olympic stories and wondering how he picked the ones that he did and then sorted out how to tell them with such extraordinary power."

USOC chief executive officer Scott Blackmun said in a prepared statement, "For more than six decades, Bud Greenspan has connected the Olympic Movement to everyday people in ways the founders of the Games couldn't have imagined.

Greenspan died over the weekend due to complications from Parkinson's disease, according his companion Nancy Beffa.

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