Cycling Road Cycling

Place a bet in the morning and then enjoy it all day? If that’s your thing, then betting on cycling is for you. The sport of endurance lends itself perfectly to betting. More so than in other sports, cycling rewards knowledge. Information about the teams, stages, sprinters and classification riders, ‘good legs’ and equipment all play a role in the day’s win.

This is the only sport where a stage of Paris-Nice, a 163-kilometre ride from Les Bréviaires to Bellegarde, is considered a ‘sprint’. On this page, you will find all the information on betting on cycling, for the novice viewer and the experienced enthusiast.

Note: Betting on cycling is seasonal betting. In summer, the big cycling tours start, where cyclists take on more than 200km daily for weeks on end. Some rest days excluded. Bookmakers therefore pull out all the stops in May, June and July to attract cycling fans. Keep a close eye on our site during this period, as we will always keep you updated on the latest promotions!

More than cycling fast

Of course you need to be able to cycle hard, but on one-day races like Paris-Roubaix and Liège-Bastogne-Liège you don’t cycle 250km at full power. Cycling is above all a tactical game, a cat and mouse game between teams. Escaping in time, chasing the peloton, relieving teams in the vanguard, making domestiques work for leaders; everything in cycling is strategy. Maybe excluding crashes. 

You only start seeing this when you get the hang of it, in the famous words of the country’s greatest footballer. In other words, cycling is something you have to learn to watch. Just as you have to learn to drink wine. But when you get the hang of it, every kilometre of tarmac becomes exciting.

While to the layman, it looks like nothing happens 245km out of 250km. If you get the hang of the game, you also start to see the differences between riders. Tom Dumoulin is an absolute boss in time trial, while Sagan and Kittel, for example, are typical sprinters. Then you have cyclists who ride for day victories and cyclists who focus on the GC, like Chris Froome. So keep a cyclist’s goal in mind when betting. 

If you zoom out slightly, you will get a clearer idea of exactly what the team has in mind. Team leaders are in close contact with the riders and rarely is a decision taken by the team without their consent. Whether or not a gap is actively closed depends entirely on team strategy, which always takes precedence over individual interests. If Quintana takes off, his teammates will not be allowed to close the gap from the peloton. Even if there is someone in between them with a better chance of winning the day’s race.

Finally, it is important to find out about the course before betting on cycling. Are there any tough climbs in the course? Sharp descents? With this information, you can often already make a good sorting of the chaff & contenders.

Betting on major cycling tours

In addition to the Tour de France, the big three cycling tours include the Tour of Spain and the Tour of Italy. Better known as the Vuelta and the Giro d’Italia. These tours all last 23 days, with 21 days of racing and (only) two days of rest.

Betting on cycling tips

Betting on cycling is all about momentum. Pitting odds and risk against each other. The absolute mother of all cycling bets is who will win the Tour de France, but when do you bet? You can bet months before the tour, with high odds and a lot of uncertainty.

You might just end up betting on a rider who does not appear at the start in the end. You have slightly more control over so-called Head-to-Head bets, where, for example, you let Mike Teunissen ‘take on’ Wout van Aert. The duel between them is what your bet will be judged on. How manyth they finish and in what time is irrelevant.

In a classic Liège-Bastogne-Liège, it often ends in a bunch sprint, leaving the winner less than a second ahead of the number two. In this, a winner is hard to predict. You can then alternatively start betting on the margin the winner has over the number 2.

Cycling knowledge is rewarded, which is why we advise you to bet mainly live when you know what you are doing. A race takes hours, so you have plenty of time to place a bet. If you wait too long, the odds are no longer worth it. Only there is a sweet spot where, with a trained eye, you can spot developments in the race that have not yet been picked up by the odds. This is where the expert stands out.