WORLD SPORTS SCENE / RANDY HARVEY : Greenspan Shows the Human Side of Olympics

Time magazine called it a scandal, and although that may prove no more accurate than referring to a kayak as the Queen Mary, the public perception seems to be that the U.S. Olympic Committee is the sports version of the Nixon White House.

President Robert Helmick has resigned, Executive Director Harvey Schiller is under investigation and U.S. Skiing, the national governing body for that sport, is promising that more executive committee heads will roll. We wait breathlessly for the other ski to drop.

Not a moment too soon, along comes Bud Greenspan to remind us what it is that we like about the Olympics.

It is not jingoism, commercialism or professionalism. It is not politics or pharmaceuticals. And Greenspan touches on them hardly at all in his award-winning, 22-part documentary series, “The Olympiad,” which begins Monday night on ESPN and will be shown in one-hour segments leading up to the 1992 Olympic Games next summer at Barcelona, Spain.

In his films, Greenspan celebrates human achievement. But he does not define that by the number of medals won. His story of the Tanzanian marathon runner who persevered despite a leg injury to cross the finish line long after the other competitors in the 1968 Games at Mexico City is as compelling as the story of two-time champion Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia.

“I search for the humanity in every story,” Greenspan said during a recent visit to Los Angeles. “There are no great people, but there are great challenges that ordinary people meet.”

Greenspan was attracted to the Olympic flame in 1948 at London, where he went on assignment as a young radio broadcaster from New York. Among the stories he reported was that of Hungarian Karoly Takacs, a world champion pistol shooter who lost his right hand--his pistol hand--in a grenade accident while on military duty in 1938. Ten years later, having trained himself to shoot with his left hand, Takacs won an Olympic gold medal.

Historian by education, journalist by trade, romantic by nature, Greenspan has found fertile ground in the Olympics for his gift as a storyteller. But he would have found stories in whatever field he chose to explore, whether it had been baseball, the Civil War or the opera.

“People come to me after seeing my films and say, ‘Bud, I didn’t know I liked sports until now,’ ” he said. “I tell them, ‘This doesn’t mean that you like sports; it means you like people.’ ”

Film became Greenspan’s medium. He and his wife, Cappy, who died in 1983, achieved prominence in 1976 with a 10-part series that was shown on PBS and won two Emmy awards. It was expanded in 1984 for ABC to 22 parts, which will be seen on ESPN. Six, including Monday night’s “The Marathon,” have been updated to include footage from the Olympic Games of 1984 and ’88.

Because they have not been updated, several segments are obsolete. That is particularly true of “The East Germans,” “The East Europeans” and “The Soviet Athlete,” which would be more effective if they reflected today’s political realities.

But even when those segments were current, they were not necessarily realistic. There is not even a passing mention, for instance, in “The East Germans” about widespread speculation, since substantiated, that performance-enhancing drugs contributed to their success.

Greenspan, however, never promised to bring all the truths of the Olympics into your living room. He only promises that you, as he has done for 43 years, will bask in their aura. He promises you a rose garden. And delivers beautifully.