The Track Cycling at the Rio Olympic games continues on Friday with the Women’s Team Sprint.
NOTE – The Men’s Team Pursuit final is also on Friday – this is previewed in an earlier post.
View it here:
Women’s Team Sprint
All three rounds of the Women’s event take place on Friday. The track cycling on Friday starts with the Qualifiers in this event. The format follows the men’s event – with the four fastest qualifiers heading into Round One where they face a knock-out. The two winners proceed to the gold medal ride-off whilst the losers go to he bronze medal ride-off.
The teams finishing 5th-8th in the Qualifiers also head to Round One where they face off to determine their finishing place overall.
Unlike the mens event, the women race over 500 metres and only have 2 riders. The riders will be competing for less than 34 seconds with the top teams completing the course in the low 32s. This is fast, very fast!
I will use the 2016 World Championships as a guide to how things might unfold on Friday in Rio. At the World’s China qualified with the fastest time but were disqualified from the final. The Chinese riders were penalised for an illegal change and will be smarting to put that behind them here. The bookmakers are strongly on their side and have them as red-hot favourites for the gold medal. They are priced in the 1.40 range and are really too short to back.
Russia were able to claim Gold at the Worlds Championships, even though they were beaten by the Chinese on the track. They are second favourites to win here in the 3.10-4.33 range. However, only two bookmakers are offering an Each Way market on this event and only one of those (Labdrokes) has good EW terms (top 2 1/3 of the odds). They have Russia priced at 3.75 which doesn’t really work as an EW bet when they are probably just riding for silver.
Germany and Australia, 3rd and 4th respectively at the World Championships fill the 3rd and 4th favourite slots. Germany can be backed as high as 12.0 Win Only or 9.00 with Ladbrokes. However, they were 4/10ths of a second slower than the Chinese pair and a quarter of a second slower than Russia so they seem to be fighting with Australia for bronze.
Women’s Team Sprint Tips
No bets for me I’m afraid.
If you are really brave you could place a small Win Only bet on Russia and hope China make a mistake – not for me though.
