Locog is now the focus of attention, plus Qatar's bid for 2017 and who will play football for Team GB
In the opening episode of BBC4's painfully acute mockumentary Twenty Twelve, Hugh Bonneville's Olympic Deliverance Team chief feels things start to tip out of control as a result of a snafu with a countdown clock commissioned from a trendy Shoreditch artist.
At the Canary Wharf skyscraper where the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games are based (next door to the one where the BBC's fictional take was filmed) Lord Coe must have feared that life was imitating art when the organisation's biggest milestone to date ? the launch of the ballot for 6.6m tickets ? was undermined by its own clock up.
Locog's Trafalgar Square timepiece was manufactured by a Swiss clockmaker rather than a Nathan Barley type but the embarrassment was just as stinging when it stalled a few hours after it was launched amid champagne and sparklers.
As far as the big picture is concerned it is an amusing but relatively inconsequential incident (if not, presumably, for Omega's PR department). But it highlighted a wider truth ? from here on in everything that Locog does will be open to minute scrutiny and, often, mockery.
With most of the venues close to complete and the process of handing them over to Locog underway, the scrutiny of the media and the public will move from the amount invested in building them by the Olympic Delivery Authority to the job that Lord Coe's organisation will do in filling them.
Its foresight in signing up domestic sponsors who will contribute more than a third of the �2bn it will spend on staging the Games (the rest comes from IOC sponsors and ticket sales) before the economic slump has been rightly lauded. Likewise its ticketing policy appears enlightened and fair thus far.
But this will be the moment when the theoretical planning and fundraising stops and it must take centre stage. While Coe has never been shy of the limelight, there must be a danger that he will become so ubiquitous that the public becomes sick of hearing from him.
As he took to the airwaves on Tuesday, he already sounded a little tired and prickly as he faced the inevitable questions about ticket prices and Visa's monopoly.
The challenge for Locog's marketing team, which this week launched its biggest advertising campaign to date to coincide with the opening of the ticket ballot, will be to keep the pot simmering without reaching boiling point. The things that will define London's Olympics as unique and make it live up to the "once in a lifetime" hype ? the atmosphere throughout the city and the country, the "look and feel", the extent to which the venues come alive ? are still to be defined.
Coe has often talked of Britain being a "slow burn" nation ? the challenge will be to time the moment of ignition for maximum impact.
There is a lingering feeling that things have gone a little too smoothly for Locog so far. Some insiders feel that a minor media furore would not be a bad thing in order to battle harden its troops for the challenges ahead.
No longer can it remain in the shadows or micromanage everything. As it expands in headcount and remit, it must learn to roll with the punches a little and take the rough with the smooth as it becomes a more public beast.
And that is also why its ongoing contractual row with the British Olympic Association ? soon to be adjudicated on by the Court of Arbitration for Sport ? does matter, for all Coe's attempts this week to dismiss it as a "narrow and technical" dispute.
It is damaging not because it shines a light on the disquiet that has long existed in the shadows at UK Sport and Locog over the BOA's spendthrift ways and empire building instincts, or the personality clashes that have left its chairman Lord Moynihan isolated from even his natural allies, but because of the public perception the squabble creates.
Given that next week's episode of Twenty Twelve features a coachload of journalists and officials getting lost on their way to an event in the Olympic Park (that has happened in real life too), Coe might be watching the rest of the series through his fingers.
The need for clean winners
The UK Anti-Doping chief executive, Andy Parkinson, is well aware that his recently constituted organisation will come increasingly under the spotlight as the Games near. As the anti-doping community descended on Twickenham for a conference this week, he said that since the launch of a standalone agency, links with law enforcement agencies have improved hugely over the last 16 months to give "a much better idea of what is going on around doping in the UK".
But he rightly believes the goal of a "clean Games" to be a misnomer: "The general public are more sophisticated but they are also more demanding. They want clean winners. We want to provide the public with confidence that we are doing all we can. But there is also now a recognition that doing all you can doesn't mean that you will eradicate doping."
Wada's director general, David Howman, did his best to go to war on complacency, raising the spectre that there are still many more Marion Joneses out there going under the radar. And Parkinson's rhetorical question, around what the public reaction would be if there was a Balco style drug bust in the UK just prior to the Games, is an intriguing one: "The pressure is going to build from here. The challenge for us will be at what point a potential Balco goes from being a success to a failure for UK plc. Is it two days before the Games, two weeks, two months or two years?"
Qatar's bid for 2017 might leave West Ham with track but no athletics
Qatar's decision to bid to host the 2017 World Athletics Championships raises the possibility that the Olympic Stadium will never again be full for an athletics meeting after the Games, despite the recent decision to award it to West Ham and Newham Council on the basis the track would be retained. Combine Qatar's soaring ambition and financial clout with the fact that the IAAF's coffers are far from overflowing and there is inevitable concern that it could trump London's attempt to win the right to host the event.
Before Qatar threw its no doubt expensive hat in the ring, there was growing confidence that the stadium decision would make it third time lucky for London after the Picketts Lock fiasco in 2005 and the 2015 bid that was postponed pending the outcome of the stadium legacy tussle.
Who will play football for GB?
The interminable debate over the make-up of the British men's and women's football team in 2012 looks no closer to resolution. To recap: the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland FAs are uncomfortable about playing in a British team for fear it will dilute their independence in the eyes of Fifa. The FA's Lord Triesman (remember him?) thought he had found a way through by proposing that they select an English team that would go under the Team GB banner. But Moynihan believes that would not be fair on the other home nations players who might make a combined squad. Meanwhile the FA has ruled that no one from the Euro 2012 squad will join the under 23 squad for the Olympics four weeks later.
"I think there is a way through this but it is difficult. It's a circular argument that I'm struggling to find a way out of to be honest," was the less than encouraging verdict of Alex Horne, the FA general secretary, at last week's event at St George's Park in Burton.
The long-running dispute could even impact on Locog's ambitions to sell out all its 8.8m tickets ? around 1m of those are in football stadiums and those for the women's tournament in particular are expected to be among the most difficult to shift. The longer the impasse goes on about who is going to feature, the less appetite there might be for watching them.
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