Saturday will bring the Men’s Snowboard GS competition and a good Winter Olympics betting opportunity.  While the Giant Slalom competition isn’t as nearly as high profile as the halfpipe event that Shaun White dominated last week, it does present a good opportunity for Canada to win a gold medal.  Unlike the halfpipe competition, which is dominated by American riders the other two snowboarding events–GS and snowboard cross–aren’t.  Why this is the case isn’t exactly clear–probably the best explanation is that the many excellent US snowboarders are more interested in the halfpipe and free riding.   That’s where all of the money, fame, notoriety, sponsorships, chicks, etc typically can be found in snowboarding.  No one makes snowboarding films about slalom events, after all…

WINTER OLYMPICS–MEN’S SNOWBOARD GIANT SLALOM:

While I won’t profess to being a figure skating expert, I am an expert on finding wagering value and there’s a good one at Sports Interaction.  Chicks dig figure skating, and if you’re unfortunate enough to be forced to watch it by a wife or significant other you can make the experience less miserable by being incoherently drunk by having a little wagering interest on the outcome.

The figure skating competition works like this–tonight will feature what is known as the ‘short program’ and on Thursday they’ll have the ‘free skate’.  In addition to being ‘shorter’ the short program also includes a bunch of ‘required elements’ that all skaters must do lest they hurt their score.  The ‘free skate’ doesn’t have these required elements.  The skater with the best combined score at the end of the two programs wins, and that’s where our handicap will begin:

Well we’ve hit two of our three Winter Olympic selections including a play on Shaun White’s absolutely insane gold medal winning halfpipe performance.  Of course betting on White in the halftime was as much of a no-brainer as betting on Fedor Emelianenko against Richard Simmons.  Now we’ll head to the distaff side of the mountain and take a look at the Women’s Snowboard halfpipe competition.  If you haven’t seen White’s amazing run from yesterday go check it out.  He’s so smooth its sick.

Shaun White Gold Medal Halfpipe Run

WINTER OLYMPICS–WOMEN’S SNOWBOARD HALFPIPE:

The competition starts at 3:30 PM Eastern.  Like the men’s halfpipe competition, the US dominates.  The US Women swept all three medals at the 2004 Winter Olympics and there’s a good chance they’ll do so again.  So that makes the trick trying to decide which of the US riders will get the gold.  Kelly Clark is the favorite and is definitely worth considering.  She won the 2002 Winter Olympic Gold in Salt Lake City.  The longest odds of the American women are for defending Olympic gold medalist Hannah Teeter who is available at +1250 at Bookmaker.

First of all, WTF is up with NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics?  The *way* they cover the games is bad enough, trying to make every event a soap opera with ‘up close and personal segments’ that attempt to depict every athlete as having overcome some great personal tragedy to make it to the games.  There’s always some of those, but most Olympic athletes–particularly at the Winter Games–come from relatively affluent backgrounds and enjoy an enviable lifestyle.  Plus it becomes a ‘boy who cried wolf’ situation–harping about every minor inconvenience athletes have to overcome ad nausium undermines the impact of *real* underdog overcomes adversity stories when they come along.