Ski racing is a sport of fine margins, as milliseconds and inches can mean the difference between winning gold and missing the podium entirely. As a result, experience and course experience is more paramount than technical ability, since every ski racer who makes it to the Olympic level has the acumen to win gold on his best day.
It’s not a surprise, then, that the 10 men with the shortest odds of winning Wednesday’s Super G all grew up skiing in the Alps. Most of the racers are familiar with the Bormio venue that will serve as the venue for the competition, given that it’s a regular stop on the FIS Alpine Skiing World Cup circuit. The race will begin at 5:30 a.m. ET (11:30 a.m. local).
Swiss skier Marco Odermatt is a +200 favorite to take home the gold at DraftKings Sportsbook, which would be Switzerland’s fourth of these games so far and vault it into second in the overall medal table, behind Norway. His countryman Franjo von Allmen (+275) follows, and Italian Giovanni Franzoni (+400) rounds off the possible podium.
Men’s Super-G prediction, pick
It’s hard to go against Odermatt, who has been dominant in the Super-G so far, finishing no worse than fifth in any of his starts and claiming two wins in his five starts. He’s also coming off of a victory in his most recent race at Kitzbuehel in Austria, claiming first place by three-hundredths of a second over von Allmen. The 28-year-old clearly loves the venue, having won at Bormio in both 2022 and 2023. He’s won the overall FIS title in each of the last four seasons and holds the lead so far.
If we go by recent history, Norway’s Fredrik Moeller (+3000) could be a strong value play. Though Moeller has somewhat struggled this season, ranking just ninth in the FIS standings, he won by 0.20 seconds the last time the World Cup Super-G was contested at Bormio in 2024. In fact, Moeller finished second and fifth in his first two Super-G starts of the season, and while he slumped to a 24th-place finish at Kitzbuehel, he was only 0.97 seconds behind Odermatt, so the margin is paper-thin.
Whoever wins will be a first-time Olympic gold medalist in the Super-G, as Austrian Matthias Meyer — who won Super-G in both the 2018 Pyeongchang and 2022 Beijing Olympics — has since retired from the sport. Moeller didn’t compete in the 2022 Olympics, when he was just 21 years old, while Odermatt failed to finish the course. He did win the Giant Slalom in 2022 and he already has a silver medal from these Games, as he and Loic Meillard finishing behind only the duo of von Allmen and Tanguy Nef in the Super Combined.
As strong as Odermatt has been and as impressive as his pedigree is, I like von Allmen’s odds just a little bit more. He’s already proven himself on the Bormio slopes, having claimed gold in the downhill by 0.20 seconds over Franzoni and 0.50 seconds over Dominik Paris, with Odermatt a further 0.20 seconds behind in fourth place. Odermatt did go 0.14 seconds faster than him on the downhill course two days later, but he didn’t have the fastest downhill time of the day, as Alexis Monney (+1400) went 11 centiseconds faster and Franzoni 0.17 seconds faster than that. The discipline is much too fickle to go for the man with the shortest odds.
Instead, von Allmen is the play. He has enjoyed a tremendous Olympics, is currently tied with Odermatt in his quest to break his countryman’s stranglehold on the Downhill world title, and has finished on the podium in each of his last three Super G races. It obviously wouldn’t be a surprise to see Odermatt win or take home a medal (-155), but von Allmen (+100) is better value.
