LONDON VAUXHALL DEALERS

Facebook is getting into the Olympic spirit with Explore London 2012 on Facebook, a portal where you can find and get Facebook updates from your favorite athletes, national teams, and individual sports during the Olympic Games in London.

Facebook says it intends to add national Olympics broadcasters such as NBC and Olympic sponsors to the London 2012 portal in the coming weeks.

The Facebook portal is the first of several efforts from the International Olympics Committee to get social during London 2012. The IOC also plans to launch London 2012-themed pages on Twitter, Tumblr, and Google+, as well as a partnership with Foursquare.

How To Like London 2012

To get Olympic updates on Facebook, all you have to do is “like” the pages for your favorite athletes, sports, or national teams via the Explore London 2012 portal. Then updates from that person's or sport's page, including personal status updates, medal standings, and photos, are pushed to your news feed. It's a simple way to keep up with personal updates from athletes such as swimmer Ryan Lochte or all the latest news from Team USA.

Explore London 2012

Facebook's London 2012 portal is well organized with a cover photo at the top, and then two profile photos for the Olympic Games and London 2012. Below that is a section of highlighted Olympic athletes, including LeBron James, swimmers Dara Torres and Michael Phelps, beach volleyball player Misty May-Treanor, and U.K. soccer star David Beckham. The site features about 200 of the several thousands of Olympic athletes competing in the games.

Below the athletes section are links to the Olympic national teams, and then to specific Olympic sports such as boxing, gymnastics, tennis, triathlon, and volleyball. Thirty-six sports are represented at London 2012, but the portal currently has links to 25.

Each Olympic sport is linked to the page for that sport's official international body. For example, liking aquatics will give you Facebook updates from Federation Internationale de Natation (FINA), the world governing body for swimming. Liking Tennis means you'll get updates from the International Tennis Federation (ITF).

A Facebook spokesperson says the company will add more sports and athlete pages to its portal before the Games begin.

Effective Use of London 2012

Facebook's portal is a handy way to find your favorite parts of the Olympics, but you might want to check out each individual page before liking to make sure you'll get updates during the games.

In my perusal of some of the top athletes' pages, most are maintaining their official pages with regular updates. But some weren't particularly active. That may change once the Olympics kicks into gear, but just be aware that some pages may not be as active as you'd like.

The Summer Olympic Games begin Friday, July 27 in London.

Connect with Ian Paul (@ianpaul) on Twitter and Google+, and with Today@PCWorld on Twitter for the latest tech news and analysis.

The International Olympic Committee is to suspend the sales process for the Sochi 2014 Winter Games while it investigates allegations that Olympic officials and agents representing 54 countries offered London 2012 tickets on the black market.

In the wake of a Sunday Times investigation that sparked an immediate IOC probe, it is understood that the process of approving the list of Authorised Ticket Resellers contracted by the Sochi organising committee has been suspended until after it reports. The investigation is expected to lead to a shake-up of the way Olympic tickets are allocated ahead of the Rio 2016 Olympics.

The London 2012 organising committee chairman, Lord Coe, said the revelations were "deeply depressing", especially after he had warned the Association of National Olympic Committees of the risks of breaking IOC rules on the resale of tickets at their general assembly in Acapulco in 2010.

The Sunday Times, which is expected to hand its dossier of evidence to the IOC this week, alleged that 27 agents representing 54 countries were prepared to sell thousands of tickets for up to £6,000 each.

Spyros Capralos, the president of the Hellenic Olympic Committee who was implicated in the illicit sale of tickets to undercover reporters, claimed the allegations were "untrue and misleading".

"The whole process was totally transparent and in accordance with the laws of the Greek state," the HOC said in a statement. "Therefore, there can be no issue on creating a 'black market' by the HOC which did not buy any tickets, whatsoever."

The HOC also claimed that quotes attributed to Capralos were "fragmentary and a patchwork of answers, made in a way that served the authors of the article".

It added: "The journalists of the Sunday Time, violated all principles of journalistic ethics, pretended to be representatives of a ticket selling company, and had even created a fake webpage."

It said that its entire allocation had been signed over to a company controlled by the Ipswich Town owner, Marcus Evans, so it did not have any tickets to sell.

Evans paid €300,000 – 10 times more than the HOC received during the Beijing Games – for the exclusive rights to resell the tickets but it said all the money went towards team preparation.

"The whole sum was exclusively allocated to the preparation of Olympic athletes of top level, at a time when, due to difficult economic conditions, the state stopped funding the Olympic preparation," it said. They claimed that the conversation with The Sunday Times journalist referred to the Sochi Games.

The former Olympic swimmer Yoav Bruck, authorised to sell tickets in Israel and Cyprus, also denied allegations that he offered undercover reporters the best seats in the house at the 100m final.

"The report is swamped with untruths, lies and inventions that cries to the heavens," he told Israel's Channel 2 TV. "I am saying that we are clean … we are not selling anything we are not allowed to."

London 2012 organisers will continue to lobby to return any unsold tickets from the 1.1 million allocated overseas to the British public. They claim that more than 50% of unsold tickets have already been re-routed for UK sale, the first time that has happened. But they will not seek to requisition tickets already allocated to the regions implicated, for fear of disadvantaging genuine purchasers in those regions.

Denis Oswald, the head of the IOC's co-ordination commission and a member of the executive board that held an emergency meeting in response to the claims, has said anyone found guilty of breaking IOC rules should be expelled from the Olympic movement.

"If you know you are breaking the rules and still do it, it is unacceptable. It is an attitude which is not acceptable and which is why I am sure the IOC want to take this very seriously and take appropriate sanctions," he said.

The IOC ethics commission is highly unlikely to report before London Games, although interim action could be taken against a handful of individuals in the meantime.

The report was the latest in a string of similar allegations. In May, a top Ukrainian Olympic official resigned following allegations that he offered to sell tickets for the London Games on the black market.

Volodymyr Gerashchenko, secretary general of Ukraine's national Olympic committee, was accused by the BBC of telling an undercover reporter posing as an unauthorised dealer that he was willing to sell up to 100 tickets for cash.