When Bud Greenspan passed away on Christmas Day, a huge chunk of Olympic magic and mystique died with him. Although he may never have actually taken part in the Games, the inimitable American film-maker had been in his time almost as much at the heartbeat of Olympism,as Baron De Coubertin himself.

Indeed, Bud (born Jonah J Greenspan) was arguably the greatest authority on the modern Games, one committed to chronicling the performances of athletes, whether in victory and defeat, evocatively capturing both the heroism and the heartbreak. It didn't matter if his films were formulaic; both in his own script and direction he always made every tale an absorbing one. His were Games with gravitas.

Bud, whom I had known for almost 40 years, was the king of the sports movies, but if you called him a fan with a film camera you wouldn't have argued. "For me," he once told me "the Olympics are two weeks of love."

No one made better, moodier, more singular documentaries than the former sportscaster from New York. Sadly, we had not been in touch since his decline into Parkinsons, complications from which finally ended his life at 84.

We first met back in 1972 at the Munich Olympics when Bud had invited a group of journalists to the screening of a film he had made on the life of the great Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila. Unfortunately, the day he had chosen was September 5 – the indelible date of the massacre of Israeli athletes by the Black September terrorist group, the most terrible moment in Olympic history.

A bemused Bud and his late wife Cappy stood around in shock like the rest of us. I recall a folorn Cappy in a phone booth - there were no mobiles in those days - frantically trying to contact those who had been invited to tell them the screening had been postponed.

It was rearranged some months later and once again bad luck befell Bud. He had invited us to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa for the premier of what was a typically beautifully classic film to take place in the city's largest cinema. They had even placed a throne to the front of the stalls for the country's then Emperor, Haile Selassie to sit on during the showing.

But there was a monumental technical hitch – the film was the wrong millimetre for the cinema's only projector and had to be rescheduled again. For some reason the cinema was no longer available and a couple of days later we reconvened in an aircraft hangar on the perimeter of Addis Ababa's airport, where at last it was shown on a hastily erected screen.

Alas, as soon as the film started, so did a torrential rainstorm, beating down on the corrugated roof of the hangar and drowning out the sound track.

Fortunately, such misfortune was rare in the career of the man someone once called the Cecil B DeMille of sports movie making. In fact, Bud was more a Fellini.

His work truly captured the spirit of what he believed the Olympics should be about, great stories born of pure athleticism. Not for him seamy side of sport. Negativity repulsed him.

He studiously shunned the sleaze, the drugs and the scandals saying, "I don't do controversy well. Some terrible things that happen around the Olympics have nothing to do with the Olympics."

It could be argued that the spectacles famously perched atop his his shaven head were permanently rose-tinted but Bud didn't care. He said, "I spend 100 per cent of our time on the 90 per cent that's good. Let others create the anti-heroes."

Bud's wife, Cappy who died in 1983 of a brain tumour - his company remained Cappy Productions - was his inspiration. Her work has been carried on by the producer Nancy Beffa, later to become his partner and companion.

Bud's Olympic career originated somewhat bizarrely in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York where he had a part as a spear carrier in 1952. "I thought I was going to be a great singer but I was wrong. The guy I stood next to in the chorus was a black man named John Davis, a giant with a giant singing voice and I used to visit him at home to exchange albums and that sort of thing.

"One evening I noticed he had a gold medal on the wall. I asked him what it was and he said he won it at the 1948 Olympics. I said I was amazed that I hadn't heard of him before.  'Are you kidding?' he replied. 'Nobody has heard of a black heavyweight weightlifter.'"

Bud was angered at the injustice of this and when Davis set off for Helsinki to defend his title, he tagged along with a film camera. "I'd never made a film before in my life and I didn't have a clue what I was doing." But his 15 minute film featuring Davis retaining his medal was a great success and as Olympic films have done latterly, was used as a propaganda role, shown repeatedly by the US Government to rebut Soviet claims that black people in America were denied opportunities to make a name for themselves.

That film was a springboard to a career which embraced eight Summer and Winter Olympic Games documentaries and others including one in which he took Jesse Owens back to Berlin. This was to become one of a 22 part Olympiad series shown here on the BBC in 1976.

In 1984 he bid successfully to film the Los Angeles Games having caught what he called the Olympic Fever. "But it's a nice disease," he said. Invariably, two weeks of Olympic filming were followed by a year of editing, a million feet of film down to the 15,000 final cut. "It's not what you put in," said Bud, "It's what to leave out."

Interestingly, it was Bud's brilliant documentary which seemed to clinch the 2008 Games for China during the their presentation to the IOC – rather ironically in view of the then US antipathy towards China."

"I never had any qualms about helping the Chinese," he argued at the time."I'm convinced the Olympics will be in the right place. They can only assist with the social and political reforms in a totalitarian state, as they did in Moscow in 1980.''

An unabashed proselytiser of Olympian ideals, he detested the Games' descent into dishonour, never more so than at time of the Salt Lake City corruption revelations. But he admitted: "You cannot guarantee it won't happen again. Sport is no better or worse than any other aspect of life, and those who are looking for 100 per cent purity in the Olympics aren't living in the real world."

He also expressed sympathy with the under-fire President Juan Antonio Samaranch. "He may act in a grandiose manner but I do not think he is personally corrupt. There are others in the IOC whose arrogance far outstrips his. OK, so there are some rotten apples, but you don't sack the police chief because a few cops break the rules."

His official film from Lillehammer -16 Days of Glory- won three of his seven Emmy awards. A "docudrama" on the life of Olympic champion Wilma Rudolph, starring Ciceley Tyson and Denzil Washington, was one of the highest-rated TV films in America during the 1970s; similarly acclainmed was his memorable 1980s series Numero Uno on the careers of the great and the good in world sport.

Although he spurned controversy for his movies, Bud was happy to write about it in two books, We Wuz Robbed and Play it Again, Bud though these covered incidents which had set fans arguing (like Geoff Hurst "did the ball, cross the line?" goal in the 1966 World Cup) rather than those of a more unsavoury nature like Ben Johnson's drugs run of 1988.

Samaranch, who presented him with an Olympic Order award in 1985, called him "an everlasting friend of the Olympic family." Bud Greenspan was more than that - a great film-maker. a great humanitarian and one of sport's last great romantics.

Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Olympics, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire.