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.

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.

She’s 15 years old, and one of the top athletes in the world at the Junior Level. The Singapore Games will give her the chance to enjoy competition at the highest levels.

I wish her good luck (though I want the US to beat her, personally). Making the UK team in 2012 may be more difficult than making the Youth Olympic Team, but she’ll have the opportunity. You can find out more about McKinna on BBC Sport.

If you live in the UK, it’s time to get psyched up! This weekend is open weekend for the London 2012 games. There will be games-inspired events occurring around the country between now and the time of the Olympics.

You can see the schedule at London2012.com. If your family is looking for some free fun, check out the calendar. You can try out a variety of sports. I’ve always wanted to try out luge… wrong season though (I did go down a waterslide last week on an inner tube, I wonder if that counts.

You can look up the events by location, date, and by type.

For us that live outside the UK, we’ll just have to live vicariously through your experiences.

If you’re planning on attending the 2012 London Olympics, you might want to sign up for ticketing information. They will be going on sale in 2011, so you still have some time, but you might want to sign up now, so you won’t forget.

If ticket sales for London are anything like they were for Vancouver, people in the UK will be eligible to buy the tickets first. There will be plenty of tickets for people in other countries; not all tickets will be released at once. To get the best tickets, you might need to buy a package that includes airfare and hotel. How ticket sales are actually handled will depend on the country that you live in.

The only credit card accepted at the Olympic games is Visa. If you don’t have a Visa card, you will have to get one to pay for the games online. If you don’t like credit card debt, Visa debit and prepaid cards will work just as well as a regular credit card… so, if you don’t have a Visa credit card and your debit card is a Mastercard, you can always go to the grocery store and buy one of those prepaid cards… but you have a year to get one. At the games, the Official Olympic stores… same thing; they only take Visa cards or cash.

There will be free events, like cycling and the marathon.

To express your interest in 2012 London Olympic games tickets, visit tickets.london2012.com.

In 1948, London hosted what would be known as the “austerity Olympics”. The world was just emerging from world war. Simon Jenkins of the UK Guardian argued for a return to the austerity Olympics… way back in 2008. Things have not improved since.

For London, many of the cogs are already in place. But it’s not too late for Rio to host their own austerity games. There are some things that they have to do… they need to make sure that Rio is safe when the world arrives there. They need to have places for the athletes to compete. Even some of the infrastructure needs to be built. However, in tough times, do we really need to try to best the 2008 Beijing Olympics? There are ways to cut costs, and perhaps Brazil should look into that. They have hosted major soccer events in the past, that can be a base for their austerity Olympics. If London can host a pared-down games after coming out of war (where their city was bombed), then Rio can offer a pared-down version of the games.

In 2018 and 2020, it is possible that the games will be awarded to the countries that are performing the best financially. Hopefully we will be pulling out of the economic doldrums by then, but much of the work to build the games will have to come several years before the games are held. Do we really need to spend that much on the Olympic games anyway?

Until the world economy turns around, perhaps we should keep things simple.

The British government is concerned about the costs of the upcoming 2012 London Olympics. The games are still a little over two years away, but they are concerned about cost overruns.

While the Yahoo article doesn’t mention it, the problem about the cost worries probably stems from problems with the global economy. Private financing that they were expecting fell through.

The West Ham football club (that’s soccer to us Americans) is in talks to jointly use the stadium. This could potentially help their financing problems.