I don’t mean to keep coming back to the Olympics when the football season is getting near, but there just keeps being interesting topics to consider. I promise I won’t talk about it anymore by next week. Anyway, I want to take a few minutes to talk about the sprints.
We’re back, and we’re hitting the ground running. We’ll be focusing heavily on football for the next while, but before we do I want to take a look at the Olympics before it is too late. I have very much enjoyed watching these games, and attempting to find attractive bets despite a level of knowledge that falls well below that I have for other sports. That’s right I’ll admit it – I know football better than table tennis. As we speed into and through the second and final week of the games, here are five spots that I’ll be paying attention to and may consider pointing part of my bankroll towards:
Two things are catching my eye as I glance at the sports news today:
The Olympics are now only three days away. I will be writing extensively about how to get some action down on them as they go on. For now, though, the biggest story is obviously the basketball – the Redeem Team. My position on them is this – I think that they are going to win the gold medal, but they are ridiculously undervalued to do so, so I won’t be betting on them. Proof of the difficulties came in full force last night. They played an exhibition game against Australia. The Aussies rested Andrew Bogut, so it should have been an absolute and utter cake walk for the Americans. It wasn’t. They ultimately won by 11, but en route they encountered way more troubles than they should have. The Aussies were close well into the third quarter, and they were able to shake Kobe Bryant and knock him off his game. I’m not saying for a second that this shows that the Americans are going to lose. It doesn’t. What it does show, though, is that international basketball is tough, and anything could happen. This will not be the walk in the park for the Americans that the odds and much of the media suggests it will be.
I’m not an American, but my Canadian basketball team didn’t make the Olympics (it’s hard to do when Steve Nash is your only decent player and he isn’t playing on the national team any more), so when it comes to Beijing I will have to make due with cheering for the Americans. As a bandwagon fan, then, I have to say this – if the team doesn’t win the gold medal they should all retire from basketball immediately. This team is ridiculously dominant. I know that the world is catching up with them (or has mostly caught up), but it is completely impossible for a team to be as deep as the one just announced as the next version of the Dream Team.
