The Paris 2024 Olympics continues to head towards a close on Thursday when plenty more sport gets played out across the whole of France on a day where there are plenty more gold medals on the line in a number of events.
We are getting to the stage of the Olympics where the events are beginning to wind down but despite that there is still some excellent sport to look forward to in a vast number of sports throughout Thursday.
Gold Medal Events
- Athletics
- Boxing
- Canoe Sprint
- Diving
- Hockey
- Sailing
- Sport Climbing
- Swimming
- Taekwondo
- Track Cycling
- Weightlifting
- Wrestling
Other Events
We don’t have too many other sports going on at this stage of the Olympics and the ones which are will be in the closing stages. We have the semi-finals of the beach volleyball events and the men’s basketball taking place on Thursday while the semi-finals of the women’s water polo and the women’s handball will also be staged. The second round of the women’s golf tournament will be played out at Le Golf National while the table tennis is at the semi-final stage as well.
Cycling
We are back at the Velodrome for a bet on Thursday where two gold medals will be up for grabs in the Men’s Omnium and the Women’s Keirin. There are British favourites in both events but the Omnium market leader, Ethan Hayter, had a bit of a mare towards the end of the Men’s Team Pursuit on Wednesday and that immediately puts me off getting involved there. It might be that Benjamin Thomas is now the value to give the host nation a gold. The better bet comes in the Women’s Keirin though.
We’ve had all the preliminaries for this event and on Thursday it will be the quarter finals down to the gold medal and I think Emma Finucane is a good thing to pick up her second gold of the games. She looks to have everyone covered in a sprint so it is all about just staying out of trouble tactically and she is going to be hard to beat. She is in the weakest of the quarter finals and the fact four out of six progress means she can probably go easy in that race and save something for later in the day. The British woman is an absolute speedster and will be hard to beat.
Beach Volleyball
It is semi-final day under the Eiffel Tower where the beach volleyball will play down to the medal matches and we have four intriguing matches on show between eight pairs who have certainly done enough to deserve to be at this stage of the competition. There are some one-sided matches as far as the odds suggest but I’m expecting some close matches. There is one match where the odds are much more level but I believe they might be the wrong way around.
That comes in the first of the women’s semi-finals where Melissa Humana-Parades and Brandie Wilkerson look big at odds against to take care of the Swiss duo Tanja Huberli and Nina Betschart. The Canadian pair are the fourth seeds in this event, although you wouldn’t have thought that was the case in the pool stage where they couldn’t get going at all. Since we have gone to the knockout stage though they have shown their class. Coming through without dropping a set. To be fair to the Swiss pair they haven’t dropped a set all tournament yet but their pool looked a weak one. They went well against the USA pair in the quarter final but the DJ at the stadium continually introduced Wilkerson as the best blocker in beach volleyball and the longer this has gone on the more we’ve seen that. This one has three sets written all over it but that class of Wilkerson at the net could be the difference.
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Athletics
It is another big night of action inside the Stade de France where we crown the Men’s 200m and Women’s 400m Hurdles champions as well as the Men’s 100m Hurdles winner and in the field the Women’s Long Jump and Men’s Javelin finals will be contested too. There isn’t much in the way of value on the track in terms of the winners with odds on favourites in all three events but if we take Noah Lyles out of the equation in the 200m final there might be value to be had.
The favourite without him is the Botswana athlete Letsile Tebogo, who finished ahead of Lyles in the semi-finals but make no mistake about it the 100m champion was managing himself in that race. This is Tebogo’s first Olympics though and we saw in the 100m the fancied runner struggling under pressure. I’m keen to take him on here and wouldn’t be surprised if this is an American 1-2-3 and I fancy that the double figure price on Erriyon Knighton without the favourite could be too big. The 20-year-old is trending in the right direction having finished fourth in Tokyo and then third followed by second in the last two World Championships at this distance so if he continues that trend he’ll win this race. I don’t think he’ll win it but he has Lyles on his inside and everyone who matters to us in terms of this bet on his outside so he’ll be able to gauge where he is in the race. Knighton feels like the forgotten man of this race but he shouldn’t be. I’ll take the 10/1 on him without Lyles.
Basketball
We’ll finish our betting portfolio in the Olympics on Thursday in the basketball arena where Team USA have already been good to us a couple of times in these games and I see no reason why they won’t be again when they go up against Serbia in the pick of the semi-finals in the evening. USA surely only have to stay upright to win the gold medal in this event and look to be getting better with every match that they play in France.
That doesn’t bode well for a Serbia side who have already faced USA in the preliminary stage of the competition where they lost by 26 points so I’m a little bit surprised that the handicap line here is only 15.5. That was the first game in the competition for USA and since then they have been in complete control including an emphatic win over Brazil in the quarter final. Serbia were taken to overtime by Australia in the quarter final, a side who only won one of their pool matches. These two met in a warm up game ahead of the Olympics where USA won by 26 and I’m expecting another comfortable win for them here.
Tips
Back E.Finucane to win Women’s Keirin for a 3/10 stake at 2.00 with Coral
Back Melissa/Brandie (Canada) to beat Huberli/Brenner for a 3/10 stake at 2.10 with Sky Bet
Back E.Knighton to win Men’s 200m (w/o Lyles) for a 1/10 stake at 11.00 with Betfair
Back USA (-15.5) to beat Serbia for a 3/10 stake at 1.91 with Bet365
