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I begin this week’s contribution with a somewhat overdue apology. I’d like to say sorry to my old boss for making him cover an extra shift on a New Year’s Day in the 1980s. I very much doubt he’ll be reading this so I think I’m probably safe now in admitting that, when I said I was stuck in a snowdrift 70 miles from the office, I was actually trying to sleep off a hangover from a Hogmanay party that had got wildly out of hand. Now you could say this displayed a rather cavalier attitude to work on my behalf but, in my defence, I had toiled all the way through the Christmas holiday that year and my unscheduled day off did highlight a niche in the betting market  which has only recently been filled. That particular New Year there was an awful lot of snow around and all of the football, rugby league and horse racing had been either postponed or abandoned. Which meant, in those days, that the only sport you could watch on TV was skiing. Alas, sat in the pub chasing the hangover with some liquid hair of the dog, there was no way you could get a bet on the downhill or the slalom, not legally anyway, which someone diluted the whole experience in my opinion. Of course, things have changed for the better nowadays and I’ve noticed a couple of prominent layers have already priced up this weekend’s World Cup events in northern Italy involving the sport’s best men and women. It’s the men’s downhill at Val Gardena that interests me most. With overall World Cup leader Benjamin Raich of Austria skipping the event along with nearest rival Carlo Janka of Switzerland, the door may have been left open for defending World Cup champion Aksel Lund Svindal to regain the initiative. At 5-1 with bet365, Svindal was second fastest in early practice at Val Gardena yesterday and, with Bode Miller (a general 14-1) and fellow American Steve Nyman (22-1 with William Hill) still on the comeback trail following injury and Swiss veteran Didier Cuche (6-1 with William Hill) suffering with damaged ribs, the Norwegian may find his toughest rival on the Saslong course is Austrian Michael Walchhofer (2-1 with bet365) who is bidding for a third consecutive downhill beneath the Gruppo Sella.