Lord Sebastian Coe believes that athletes regularly using Twitter during the Olympic Games in London will lower their level of performance.

The Games chairman is adamant that using social network sites could potentially ruin a competitor's chance of winning a medal at this summer's Olympics, which gets underway next week.

"I have found quite a close correlation between the number of tweets at competitive times and the level of under-performance," the Daily Mail quotes Coe as saying.

"I have found a direct correlation between the amount of activity an athlete enters into on social media and their ultimate performance when it really matters, but that's for them to figure out."

Meanwhile, it has emerged that three members of Australian's Olympic badminton squad have been hit with food poisoning.