Who would have thought that the Olympics would become a big potential professional negligence story before an athlete had even so much as twitched a muscle in anticipation of the starting pistol?

The G4S security scandal, despite the save-face PR offensive of the company’s management staff, is fast descending into farce, with the government giving every indication that it will seek to claim money back from the firm – a position which would appear to allow the possibility of a professional negligence claim .

However, sports minister Hugh Robertson remains hopeful that recourse to professional negligence lawyers and litigation can be avoided. “We are working through that at the moment, but all the penalty clauses that are in the contract will be activated,” he said.

It does, certainly at the surface level, seem strange that that the security company should be keeping its £57 million fee when thousands of soldiers have been forced to step into the breach caused by the firm’s negligence, costing the government a great deal of money, as well as loss of kudos.

At the moment though, it must be said that G4S has promised to reimburse the full cost of providing the extra troops.

As is so often the case with these large scale events, it is only when the accountants do their financial post mortems that it will become clear whether there might be any grounds for claims for professional negligence compensation.