THE only remaining calamity that could further dampen the mood around Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic games, it would seem, is an earthquake beneath the 400-metre track. All the other big mishaps have occurred already. On September 1st came the latest embarrassment. Japan scrapped the new logo for its games as accusations of plagiarism swirled around the design, by Kenjiro Sano, a young Japanese graphic artist. Two months earlier the government dumped an ostentatious stadium blueprint by Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi-British architect, that had helped win the bid for Tokyo, after costs spiraled to $2.1 billion, nearly twice the initial estimate.

It shouldn’t take long to whip up another logo, but construction of Tokyo’s stadium (design yet to be decided) is now a year behind schedule. Construction won’t begin until 2016 and it won’t be ready by the time of another sporting fixture, the rugby World Cup in 2019. Japan’s Olympics minister, Toshiaki Endo, has admitted that construction for the games themselves may now come right down to the wire, missing the official deadline set by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) of January 2020.

It was a Belgian designer, Olivier Debie, who filed a suit against the IOC to prevent use of the logo by Mr Sano soon after it was unveiled in July. Internet users in Japan, certainly, spotted a striking resemblance between it and a design by Mr Debie for a theatre in Liege in Belgium. Yet Mr Sano maintains there was no plagiarism, and the official reason for the committee’s decision this week was to win back the public’s support. At first Japan’s Olympic organising committee defended the logo by showing early sketches by Mr Sano’s firm, but those too resembled someone else’s design (of a poster for an exhibition about the legendary, late German typographer, Jan Tschichold). Mr Sano had also faced allegations that he had used certain elements of the emblem for Costa Rica’s national museum in a design for a zoo in the Japanese city of Nagoya.

At least no-one could accuse Ms Hadid of borrowing her unusual design for the Olympic stadium, which Japanese architects had variously compared to a bicycle helmet and to a giant turtle “waiting for Japan to sink so that it can swim away”. Ms Hadid has since hit back at Japan’s hapless Olympic organisers. The reason costs spiraled so high, she wrote, was simply that the organisers bizarrely asked contractors to submit cost estimates after promising them the work, not before. Construction costs are soaring in Tokyo and right across Japan, so competition was vital to hold costs down.

It is all grim news for Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, who promised “guaranteed delivery” of the sporting extravaganza in order to help Tokyo win the bid two years ago and who basked in the city’s triumph against Istanbul and Madrid. But at least one politician, Yoichi Masuzoe, Tokyo’s forthright governor, is having an excellent pre-Olympics. On the alleged plagiarism affair, he declared that he felt betrayed by Mr Sano just before the news came that the logo would be scrapped. For a while he even defied the government and refused to spend Tokyoites’ tax money on the grossly over-budget Hadid design. The government’s reassurances at the time, he said, were like Japan’s imperial army insisting it was winning the second world war even as things went disastrously. Could he be the man to take over?