Betfair Official Blog

Brit Watch Day 15: Vaseline and censorship

As the BBC prevent a Christian from expressing his views, Dan Fitch wonders if Gabby Logan has a future in Chinese broadcasting afterall...

We do tend to have problems with this whole relay thing don't we? Normally the British team treat the batten as if it's covered in Vaseline, but the problem on this occasion wasn't that it ended up on the floor.

All was going well for the Great Britain 4 x 100m relay team, until it came to the last leg. Craig Pickering set off so early that you would have thought that he had a bus to catch. The despairing Marlon Devonish tried to catch up with him, but his efforts only served to prove why he's never broken the ten second mark.

British hopes were also dashed in the triple jump, where Phillips Idowu chose the worst possible time to lose his first event of the year. There was double disappointment when Jonathan Edwards was about to slag off Idowu, only for Gabby Logan to butt in and abruptly end his anecdote about the lack of respect Idowu had shown to him. Clearly, saying something interesting is against BBC pundit protocol.

On Saturday, the Men's 4 x 400m relay team will be hoping to make a better fist of things than their colleagues and can be backed at [46.0]. With Christine Ohuruogo amongst the Women's 4 x 400m relay team, they are far more fancied at [15.5]. Lisa Dobriskey is a high priced second favourite at [9.0], in the Women's 1500m and is our sole hope of an individual medal on the track.

The Men's Canoeing K1 500m features Britain's Tim Brabant, who took a silver medal in the 2007 World Championship and can be backed at [12.0]. In the Women's Canoeing K1 500m, Lucy Wainwright can be backed at [20.0].

Doncaster's Sarah Stevenson is the [5.1] second favourite in the Women's Taekwondo +67kg. Stevenson broke her hand in the Olympic qualifying, but still finished second. I guess if you hit someone so hard that you break your own hand, then it's bound to do some damage to your opponent.

The Men's Diving 10m Individual Platform sees the Olympic return of the impish Tom Daley. It seems a long time since Daley last competed in these games and he will have no doubt have worked his way through plenty of colouring books. Without the distraction of his partner's mobile phone going off, Daley can be backed at [15.5] for gold and [3.5] for a podium finish.

In the Men's Cycling Mountain Bike, Britain's Liam Killeen is available at [17.5] and Oli Beckingsale also competes. What with mountain biking and BMX gaining Olympic status, it can only be a matter of time before the IOC see sense and introduce Raleigh Grifter and Chopper events to the schedule.

James DeGale has reached the final of the Middleweight Boxing and can currently be backed at [2.1]. DeGale faces the tough challenge of the Cuban Emilio Correa, but whatever the result, is guaranteed at least a silver medal.

Those are our medal hopes for Saturday and with a bit of luck we should be able to add at least one more gold medal to our already impressive total. To think that when I signed up to write this column, I assumed that I would primarily be writing about British failure.