His documentaries, which were up close and personal well before the term was devised, showcased the Olympic spirit at its most inspiring.

Perhaps the most notable was the tale of Tanzanian marathoner John Stephen Akhwari, who limped in last after bloodying himself in a fall at the 1968 Games in Mexico City.

“My country did not send me 7,000 miles away to start the race,’’ Akhwari told Greenspan. “They sent me 7,000 miles to finish it.’’

Greenspan, who was 21 when he filed his first Olympic story from a stadium phone booth at the 1948 Games in London, was a familiar fixture around Olympus, his glasses eternally perched atop his bald head.

The Games, he once told ESPN, were two weeks of love, “like Never Never Land.’’ The dark side of the Games — the doping, the politics, the corruption — he left to others. What Greenspan chronicled with his millions of feet of film were the athletes and their back stories, portraying the Olympics at their most human.