Australia’s Olympic athletes will be allowed to have personal blogs for the first time in Beijing, but face expulsion from the Games and possible legal action if they post unsuitable material.

After much debate, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has agreed to allow Games athletes to have on-line diaries, but has imposed strict limits on how they may be used.

The IOC has the power to expel athletes from the Games and pursue legal action against them if they breach the guidelines.

The content must be “dignified and in good taste” and confined solely to the athlete’s personal experiences at the Games.

The online diaries can’t be used to discuss the performances of other competitors.

This is aimed at preventing athletes using cyberspace to conduct spats such as the one between Jana Pittman (now Rawlinson) and Tamsyn Lewis around the time of the Athens Games.

Bloggers will not be able to sell advertising space or become de facto journalists by selling their web diaries to newspapers or other commercial websites.

There are also restrictions on using sound and moving images.

Australian Olympic boss John Coates said his management team were not proposing to become blog police in politically-sensitive Beijing.

“We’re not going to gag our athletes in any way and I’m certainly not going to sit up at night and read 476 blogs,” he said.

“We respect the right of our athletes to have an opinion and to express it.

“They’ll be told what the guidelines are from the IOC.

“The Olympic charter says that you can’t participate in political demonstrations. I don’t think expressing an opinion on something amounts to a demonstration.

“But our advice to athletes is: your priority should be your performance. You shouldn’t worry about these things and let it detract from that.”

© AAP 2012

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