CALL me an old cynic but I suspect this week’s deadline for ticket applications for London 2012 was the starting gun for that popular committee event – the monumental mess.

Some guy on Twitter has already claimed that if he gets all the tickets he has applied for he will have to sell his home to pay for them, which gives you some idea of the troubles ahead for the Kafkaesque allocation system.

People are just not that bright – the guy is on Twitter for a start and telling the world he is a prat.

He is not alone, though, in working on the basis that if the ticket allocation is basically a raffle the more you apply for the more likely you are to win a prize – any prize.

And if you win them all . . . ooops.

It is the same principle as people waiting for a lift who press up and down on the twisted logic that stopping lifts unnecessarily going in the wrong direction somehow speeds the process up.

At least eBayers should have been put off muddying the waters still further, apart from the truly stupid, as non-official ticket sellers face a £20,000 fine.

Obviously there will be fans of every Olympic discipline who want to see their particular sport at the highest level but most of the applications will be for the events with sporting celebrity status – athletics, track cycling and of course beach volleyball where, cleverly, early rounds have a men’s and a women’s match in each session – otherwise the blokes might have been struggling to find even a ref to turn up.

Top tickets for the final, by the way, are £450 a pop.

Apparently 6.6 million tickets are available in this release but I suspect the bulk of applications will be concentrated on events people know from TV – and from lunchtime onwards to allow travelling time.

Early morning preliminaries, even in popular sports, have taken part in stadiums and arenas that have echoed with emptiness at every games I can remember.

So historically it is fair to assume that if you have applied for the two preliminary games in the first morning basketball session, for example, or the opening rounds of archery or handball the chances are that not only will you get tickets but the competitors will hang on until you get there.

I hope I am wrong and it all goes smoothly with every session sold out – we taxpayers pick up the shortfall remember – but flying pigs is not yet an Olympic sport.