Every few hours, it seems, attention is diverted from Olympic competition to the organizers, who have had to explain a series of foibles, accidents and miscalculations. The Vancouver Games have not reached their midpoint, but there is a sense that they will be remembered in part for a baffling number of blunders and for the unseasonably warm weather that has scrambled skiing and snowboarding events here at Cypress Mountain and about 90 minutes north at Whistler. The incidents range from the luge accident on Friday that killed Nodar Kumaritashvili of the Republic of Georgia to public-relations messes like the chain-link fence around the Olympic flame and the canceling of nearly 30,000 tickets at the snowboarding site because of unsafe ground conditions. Perhaps the glitches were foreshadowed from the beginning, when one of the four arms of the Olympic caldron did not function properly during the climactic moment of the opening ceremony. 'On mistakes, we have to fix them,' John Furlong, chief executive of the Vancouver Olympics organizing committee, said Wednesday at a news conference dominated by questions about the problems. 'On the others, honestly, I mean, I think that when I look at the first four or five days, I don't think there's anybody here or anybody in the city that would have been prepared to say I predicted some of the things that Vancouver 2010 had to deal with.' An ice-resurfacing machine malfunction disrupted the speedskating, and an American-made Zamboni had to ride to the rescue of a Canadian-made Resurfice machine. A spigot opened suddenly on the luge course, sending water onto the track during competition. Biathlon results had to be adjusted when three competitors were mistakenly held up at the start of the women's pursuit, while in the men's race two competitors were sent off early. Things have not been smoother off the fields of play. Protests on Vancouver streets garnered live television coverage showing police officers in riot gear. A barricade collapsed at a free concert Tuesday night, injuring at least 19 people. The Alpine skiing schedule has been scrambled at Whistler because warm weather and rain disrupted training runs and course preparation. At Cypress Mountain record warmth resulted in moguls built of hay bales and the snowboard cross course turning into a ribbon of white surrounded by rocks and dirt. 