First we had the announcement that an extra £271m was required to boost security in and around the Olympic venues.

Then there was the decision to splash an additional £41m on the Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies, doubling the cost.

And finally there was the National Audit Office's unseasonally gloomy forecast that organisers would spend all but £36m of the remaining £500m contingency.

The Olympic Park, in Stratford, east London is quickly taking shape. Picture: Getty images.

It was the first time since the 2008 financial crash forced organisers to bail out the athletes village, that the project found itself on the back foot on the budget.

But suddenly the cost of the Games was back on the agenda lending credibility to all those naysayers who predicted from the outset that London 2012 would never come in on budget. With public sector cuts starting to bite, unemployment on the rise and the economic outlook so worrying, ministers knew this was not the time to be tackling headlines on rising Olympic costs.

But in the last week or so there appears to have been another shift in mood. Sources inside government have told me that the recent budget concerns are subsiding.

In fact it's my understanding that the Government will announce in a couple of weeks that £500m of contingency remains in place with around 97 or 98% of the project complete. Over the three months to the end of January there has been hardly any significant draw-down on the contingency pot leaving officials feeling increasingly confident that they are entering the home straight on costs.

Of course all that will be thrown up into the air if there is a major security scare or if another serious unforseen problem emerges. In that situation the Government will have to hope the public understand that there is no alternative but to plough more of our cash into the Olympics.

But if everything does now stay on track it raises the question of what happens to any money left over.

As I understand it the Olympic contingency sits in the Treasury and is only drawn down as required. This means any money left over will just be absorbed back into the Treasury's coffers and - given the current climate of cuts to public spending - reallocated to other areas of the public sector.

However, is there an argument to be made here for sport? Sport has done well out of the recent reorganisation of the lottery guaranteeing potential real terms increases in funding when other areas are suffering cuts.

But what if some of the money was used to deliver on those promises to increase participation off the back of the Olympics? In the long run that would potentially lead to us all being healthier and so reduce the burden on the NHS. Isn't that the sort of legacy vision we all bought into as a proper return from the £9.3bn of public money?

In reality that is a debate sport has little chance of winning. And most will just be relieved if the Government does now deliver on its promise to deliver the 2012 Games on budget.

Officials from organising committee Locog currently overseeing attempts to resolve the ticketing problems, led by commercial director Chris Townsend, won't say it publicly but anyone hoping to buy tickets from those selling them may have to wait a bit longer.

Having spent the week testing Ticketmaster's flawed resale system, it is clear London 2012 can no longer risk its reputation by trying to match sellers with buyers instantly.

Instead Locog, as part of its commitment to provide customers with a secure and legal way to sell unwanted tickets and avoid touts, will buy back tickets from those fans who no longer want them.

London 2012 games has been hit by an unprecedented demand for tickets which forced the Ticketmaster website to shut down. Photo: Getty 

Once it has gathered all the returned tickets - and that number is expected to be a tiny fraction of the overall 6.6 million tickets available to the British public - it will look to put them on sale again at a later date, probably as part of the final sell-off of the one million remaining tickets in April or May.

This is entirely sensible. There is only one thing worse than not getting tickets and that is being told you have them only to discover subsequently that the website was too slow to update and the tickets you thought you had bought went to someone else – as happened in the second round of ticket sales last year.

But there are still serious questions for London 2012 and Ticketmaster to answer on the ticket sales process.

Although Locog will blame its partner (and sponsor) for the way the ticketing process has been run, it knows its reputation has been badly hit by the various setbacks, from the initial disappointment of the first phase of ticket sales which seemed to reward those who gambled big money on vast numbers of tickets, to the second public offering, with the technical gremlins set out above.

The number of tickets being sold back into London 2012 is likely to be small. But many big challenges lie ahead.

How will the sale of the last million tickets be handled? Will it be “first come, first served” or will those punters who have missed out twice get a short period to graze over the site before everybody else – as a reward for their commitment?

Then Ticketmaster and London 2012 face the difficult task of printing the 6.6 million tickets, keeping them secure and distributing them. There are a lot of pitfalls along the way.

Unless Townsend and his colleagues at Locog get a grip on the ticketing process now then it could become an even more toxic issue for them in the run-up to the Games. It sounds like today is a step in the right direction.