While Rugby Betting has returned thanks to the New Zealand and Australian competitions, some people may be surprised to know that as far as Sports Betting goes I have actually missed cycling more. I absolutely love this sport both from a viewing and also a betting angle.
All going well we are just over a month away from the start of the Tour de France on the 29th of August and defending Champion, Egan Bernal, is currently the favourite at 22/10 with Primoz Roglic 9/2 and Bernal’s senior teammate, Chris Froome 6/1. The great French hope, Thibaut Pinot is 15/2 and looking further down the list some other notables are Tom Dumoulin 10/1 with Nairo Quintana 14/1 and a youngster who I think has a very real chance of victory, Tadej Pogacar at 16/1.
I spend many of these lockdown nights watching highlights of old Tour de France stages, so to say I am excited for the action to get going would be an understatement.
The good news is that there is quite a lot of cycling to come over the next month as we build up to the Tour and even better news is that we are still going to have the Giro and the Vuelta this year as well as many of the One Day Classics. It will be an absolute feast for cycling fans and cycling punters.
One thing I have learnt about betting on the cycling over the years is that there is no such thing as a sure thing and your selection could be going well only to puncture, crash or worse still get axed from the race for testing positive for a banned substance. Fortunately these positive tests are few and far between these days.
While a lot of people don’t realize is the number of betting options on cycling where options range from the long term betting on Stage Races to Individual Match Bets on the various stages and I enjoy structuring multiples with these.
Looking ahead to this weekend we have the live One Day Race, the Strade Bianche and here we have the sensational Mathieu Van Der Poel a 4/1 favourite ahead of defending champion Julian Alaphilippe at 5/1. What a cracking race this will be with gravel stretches and I think 4/1 is just about big enough for me to back the favourite.
Twitter: @BrentGraham.
This article was written for the CitiGaming supplement of the Citizen Newspaper and was published on the 30 July 2020.
Brent Graham is a blogger on www.goodforthegame.co.za and sends a free weekly e-mail list just CLICK HERE to register