Olympic ambassadors are chosen to encourage and inspire the public to get behind the Olympics. With Prince William and Kate’s popularity, I’m sure that they will be able to do an outstanding job with this.

The London Olympics are scheduled to begin on July 27th, and should run through August 12th. Between then and now, there will also be the first Winter Youth Olympics, which will be held in Innsbruck. The 2010 Summer Youth Olympics, held in Singapore, were poorly distributed, in my opinion. With the excellent technology that is now available, hopefully they can do a better job making the Winter Youth Olympics available for people who want to see them. My suggestion: make the broadcasts available on both the computer and on the Internet via Roku. Of course, the London Olympics will be widely available.

If you want to get tickets to the games, now is the time to act. They are taking applications for the tickets between now and April 26th at Tickets.london2012.com, if you are a resident of the United Kingdom or of one of the designated European countries. If you’re a US citizen like me, you’ll have to get your tickets through Cosport.com, the official ticket reseller. If you’re from another country, you can check the ticket availability page to see where you can buy your tickets.

For more information about the 2012 Olympics, I am keeping a Squidoo page on the subject.

Gymnastics is one of my favorite Olympic sports. It’s one that I can’t do, but I like to watch it because it is so beautiful. Both of my kids are in gymnastics, but they’re very low-level (my 4 year old was just promoted to the boy’s novice class, and my 8 year old is level 3). Even still, I love to watch the team gymnasts at our gym practice.

Gymnastics takes quite a bit of strength and balance… and years and years of training. You sometimes hear stories of runners taking up running in high school, but a good deal of the gymnasts that you see at the elite level have been practicing since they were little. It takes a lot of talent, but it also takes years and years of practice.

I think I like ladies’ gymnastics better, but they’re both awesome. There’s always some dramatic moments in the Olympics. You have to hope that your team doesn’t fall or make a fatal mistake, and hope that nobody gets injured.

Pictured here is a photo from the 1896 Athens Olympics. They did their gymnastics outside. That would be a pretty weird sight to see.

Take the 4×400 meter relay. One guy in the race can screw up the whole medal scheme for everyone else. In the 2000 men’s 4×400 meter relay, Andrew Pettigrew cheated, and everybody else on the team ends up losing their gold medals. It’s great if you’re Nigeria, Jamaica, or the Bahamas (they get their status upgraded and walk away with better medals), but for the other five members of Team USA, it’s quite messed up.

The women aren’t off the hook either. Crystal Cox, who is probably remembered more for her performance on Survivor Gabon, was found out to have used performance-enhancing drugs after running during the heats of the 4×400 relay in 2004. She lost her medal, and the Olympic committee is still trying to decide whether or not to make the others lose their medals. In the favor of the gold-medal winning team is that she ran in the heats, not the finale. We still have to wait on the verdict for that one.

It’s bad enough when you take drugs and screw up your own career, but when you go and mess it up for everyone else, it’s pretty annoying.

There are a lot of different cycling events. Some are short events that take place on a track. There is a long road race; in Beijing, riders were able to ride by some great places like the Forbidden City and the Great Wall of China. BMX has recently been added to the Olympics.

Cycling seems to be a popular sport with Olympians that compete in both the Winter and Summer Olympics. You may remember Chris Witty (another C word), who took the gold in the 1000m women’s speed skating event in Salt Lake City. Although she didn’t medal, she did place fifth at the cycling time trials for the 500m event. Clara Hughes received a gold medal in the 5000m speed skating race in the Torino Olympics, as well as two bronze medals in the 1996 Atlanta games.

As most followers of the Olympics know, the Olympics are scheduled to be in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, in 2016. I’m looking forward to these Olympics, because I might actually be in a financial position to attend: my husband will have been out of law school for a few years, and I will have been writing for about seven years, and should be making some decent money by then. However, the growing world situation concerns me. Will there even be an Olympics in 2016?

The Olympics have been cancelled three times due to world war (Berlin 1916, Tokyo 1940, London 1944). Today’s world situation doesn’t look very good. Almost every country in the Middle East is experiencing uprising at the moment. In London, rioters were shouting “off with their heads” at Prince Charles and his wife Camilla. There is instability in much of Europe, and the United States, while avoiding actual riots so far, isn’t really in a position of harmony. As Rio 2016 is more than five years away, you have to wonder what will be going on at the time.

We can hope that whatever unrest is in the air will resolve itself by the time the 2016 Olympics roll around. We’ll have to just wait and see what happens.

Today is day 1 of the A to Z blogging challenge. London is a little more than a year away (and the Innsbruck Youth Olympics are less than a year away now), so it’s time to brush off the Olympics blog and get ready for the next one.

The last time the Olympics were held in London, the world was just pulling out of World War II. The Olympics were actually cancelled in 1940 and 1944 because of the war — the world just wasn’t feeling the Olympic spirit at the time. So in 1948, London held the Olympics. They called it the Austerity Olympics. Although the war was over, rationing was still in effect, and there were still some people left homeless by the war. It was a difficult time economically, and London took a less showy approach to the games.

I don’t know how the games will go in 2012. Some in London have called for austerity once again, but who knows whether that will happen. I was thinking the other day about how the economy could affect athletes for years to come. Are there kids my daughter’s age who could be Olympic champions, but who have parents that send their child to the gym less (or not at all) because they can’t afford it? Are there athletes who have had to hang it up because of the lack of funds? I’m sure that this has happened.

Whether London 2012 is another austerity Olympics or not, we’ll have to wait and see. Sure, the Beijing Opening ceremonies were fantastic, but is that really why we watch the games? The most important thing is the competition. That won’t be ruined by any austerity program.

Recently, the 2000 Chinese Olympic team lost their bronze medal after Dong Fangxiao was discovered to be underage. The age discrepancy was discovered when Dong filed paperwork to be an official at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The US Olympic team will receive medals next month. Questions were also asked of the 2008 team; more than one of the athletes were suspected to be underage, although the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) has cleared them (my opinion is that they might mess up and be discovered to be underage in the future).

The Chinese government will make the athletes produce six different forms of ID to prove the athletes’ ages.

This would be good if the Chinese are actually sincere about their hopes to clear age-falsification; however, if this announcement is just for show, and the Chinese government is behind the age deception, then we might not see any changes soon. With the Youth Olympics, perhaps the Chinese won’t be in such a hurry to push their athletes into the wider stage at an earlier age than they are allowed.

Not only that, she will have the chance to set some records. Jenny Thompson and Dara Torres both have twelve medals each. Coughlin has 11. One more medal, she ties the other swimming greats, two more medals, she becomes the most decorated female swimmer of all time.

Coughlin took a break from swimming after Beijing, but today, she is back in the pool, and has just about reached her Beijing times once again. If she keeps up the hard work, two medals probably won’t be that difficult.

She has two years left to train: the London Olympics are now two years away.

If you’re on Facebook, the Youth Olympic Games have their own page, and you can see pictures of the event. I’m not including the pictures here due to copyright reasons.

The modern Olympic flame did not originate with the first modern Olympics in 1896. It was re-introduced during the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. The torch relay began with the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

If you ever get the chance to take part in a torch relay or Olympic flame ceremony, I highly recommend it. I was able to take part in the torch relay kickoff in Los Angeles for the Atlanta Games in 1996, and although most of the day was a blur, I do remember getting to run into the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum carrying the American flag, and it was awesome.