Athletes at the London Games will compete in twenty-six sports.

Most eyes will be on American Michael Phelps when the first gold medals in swimming are awarded Saturday. He plans to swim in seven events in London. If he wins medals in three of them, he will break the all-time record for total Olympic medals. Former Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina holds the record of eighteen.

A newcomer to the American swimming team, Missy Franklin, is also getting a lot of attention. She qualified for four individual events at only the age of seventeen.

The closing ceremony for the London Games is August twelfth.

The start of the Olympics is a high point for the sports world. But the week began on a low point for American college football in a case we first reported on last November.

On Monday the governing group for college sports punished Penn State University for its failure to stop the sexual abuse of young boys by one of its coaches. The National Collegiate Athletic Association fined the university sixty million dollars. The NCAA also cancelled all Penn State football victories for the past fourteen seasons. It banned the team from competing in postseason bowl games for the next four years. And it reduced the number of scholarships that the university can offer.

Last month, a jury found former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky guilty of abusing ten young boys, sometimes on the Pennsylvania campus. The sixty-eight-year-old Sandusky faces sentencing in September. He could spend the rest of his life in prison.