Betting

How to bet on pro cycling

Pro Cycling Bets

May 5, 2023 • 5 min read

Jay Vine 🇦🇺 - Tour de France 2022

Betting on professional cycling in incredibly entertaining, and is the sole reason we started this publication. We wanted to increase engagement for a burgeoning North American and hopefully young audience.

Here's our guide to frequently asked questions that may be holding individuals back from placing bets.

Betting Apps

Favourites

Recently we got asked how "heavy" are the favourites in pro cycling. There's no doubt the favourites take there fair share of race wins - so much so that we've written an article on "the Big Six" as they're known

But as the article mentions, it's still possible to make decent returns using each way bets as it's not often the case that more than two of the big six riders show up to any one race - leaving that crucial third slot open for a potential return

And despite being the favourites, the big six only really makes betting uninteresting in one day races and classics. With multi-day stage racing teams vying for the general classification (GC) - the overall time battle - often don't mind letting other teams or riders win a stage if it doesn't affect the overall standings.

So if your three days into a seven day event, and a number of riders are seven minutes off the leading GC contender they'll be allowed to be "free" and go for the stage win in a break.

There's also a number of smaller multi-day stage events where none of the big six show up and that's where races and betting really get interesting. We've made tremendous returns on Giro di Sicilia or the Tour Down Under this year, where there's less "for sure" information available to the betting houses and hence more chance for punters who do the research to potentially have an edge.

Betting Options

We often tend to shy away from each way bets at one day races and classics, instead preferring to parlay head to head bets, or even go big on a head to head that we think is drastically incorrectly calculated.

At the major grand tours and some of the one day classics they'll often offer up a variety of options for betting apart from 1/2/3 as well. We often scour these offering for value picks or mistakes potentially made by the betting house.

For example, for the 2023 Giro d'Italia these are some of the options you can potentially bet on.

This is similar to how during the Superbowl there's a variety of odd compared to your average NFL game (I mean, providing odds on which way the starting coin flip was going to be was strange to us, but the Gatorade color on the winning coach? Yah we could dig that).

Strategies

Despite all that, we probably only win around 55% of our bets. But we're placing a lot of bets. We wrote an article on one of our strategies for head to head betting below.

What's so intriguing to us about sports betting on cycling is the fact you're betting on rider's as the default instead of teams. There's so much that can go wrong and so many variables in play. Here's a beginner's guide for wading in.