Betting on Olympic bump: Why bettors are cautious with Summer Games

The opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics is always a unique spectacle and 2024’s edition promises to deliver with the world’s elite athletes floating down the Seine River in a nautical Parade of Nations.

The procession will mark the first time that most of the event’s competitors will be gathered together, and in the world of sports, that brings wildly varying levels of fame. Team USA flag-bearers LeBron James and Coco Gauff are well known to almost all American sports consumers, but many would likely struggle to name the majority of the other 590 athletes that comprise the team. In the United States, where legal sports betting has grown massively since the last Summer Games in 2021, this creates a special market for prospective bettors. It’s not often that sportsbooks get to offer basketball games containing multiple NBA players on both sides in the same overarching event as fencing and rowing.

It’s an opportunity for American bettors to, for once, diversify their portfolios and have fun with sports they wouldn’t usually engage with. However the lack of knowledge base in these sports and less-than-ideal scheduling prevents most bettors from contributing to any kind of meaningful handle for the overall event.

“I don’t expect the handle to be especially big primarily for one simple reason: Gamblers like to bet on things that they know,” Jay Zagorsky, a clinical associate professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, told ESPN. “When you don’t know and you’re betting just because it’s something interesting to watch on TV, you’re not going to put large amounts of money down.”

With football not starting for another month, baseball in its dog days and the WNBA taking a break for the Games, the Olympics represent a prime opportunity for larger sports betting activity during a time of year that is generally quite slow. But for as fun and unique as the Olympic offerings are, consumers aren’t branching out.

The five-on-five basketball tournaments, both men’s and women’s, are projected to be — by far — the biggest drivers of handle for sportsbooks during the Olympics. Specifically, bettors are flocking to the dominant American teams, which feature superstars from the NBA and WNBA. DraftKings reports the men’s squad as its most-bet team of the Olympics and the women’s its third. BetMGM says USA Basketball is its largest handle driver “by a mile.”

With the men’s (-400) and women’s (-1750) teams both prohibitive favorites to win gold medals in their respective events, DraftKings director of sportsbook Johnny Avello told ESPN that parlays featuring both teams have been a popular play among the public. Those odds-on favorite statuses have some bettors laying serious cash, as the men’s team shows 86% of the money to win the gold, while the women’s has 97% of the handle, per FanDuel.

Americans are, unsurprisingly, backing their compatriots, but other sports with familiar foreign athletes are sure to draw bets as well. The Spanish men’s soccer team has attracted the second-most bets of any team at the Olympics, per DraftKings. Spain’s senior team is fresh off a victory at Euro 2024, although it’s their U-23 squad that will compete in Paris.

The tennis tournaments will provide a level of familiarity both with its players, like reigning French Open champions Carlos Alcaraz and Iga Swiatek, and its venue, the iconic Roland Garros. The same goes for golf, which will play its tournaments at Le Golf National, which hosted the 2018 Ryder Cup, and will feature reigning major champions Nelly Korda, Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele.

The presence of those familiar superstars, who take up so much viewing time and betting research during the nearly four years that Summer Olympic sports get much less limelight, leave little room in most bettors’ bankrolls for anyone else.

“I see lots of people saying, ‘Okay, we’re watching the track and field, but since I haven’t been watching track and field since the last Olympics, I don’t know all the people in this race. I don’t really know how to handicap the field, so I’ll throw in five or 10 bucks, but I’m not throwing down $10,000 on the race,'” Zagorsky said.

Similarly, with so many events happening simultaneously, the smaller sports may not be able to compete with the big ones when they’re on at the same time, much in the way that postseason MLB games lose handle when they’re matched up against the NFL in October. Two small or medium sized events happening at once could also split handle from each other.

It’s also possible that the large and complex schedule of the Games could have some bettors missing out on events they may want to bet. It’s something the sportsbooks will have to be aware of as they try to reach their customers, with push notifications on mobile apps likely becoming critical.

“If you’re betting on football, there’s one o’clock games and four o’clock games on the east coast, you have a schedule, in comparison to some of the Olympic games, where I think the scheduling may not be as well known for people,” Gambling.com Group EVP of North America Max Bichsel told ESPN. “It will be incumbent upon [the operators] to effectively become the TV guide of the Olympics for people that are betting on sports so that they’re able to understand when the events are, because I’m sure they are interested.”

As part of his recent research, which analyzed 40 years of betting financial data in Nevada and the United Kingdom, Zagorsky found that there was is no statistically significant “Olympic bump” for sportsbooks during years that the games are held.

This phenomenon rang especially true three years ago at the Covid-delayed 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. The immense time zone difference, lack of spectators and general malaise coming out of the pandemic led to largely apathetic betting interest, with Avello unenthusiastically describing the action as just “ok.”

Since then, 15 states have legalized sports betting in some form or fashion, including population powerhouses New York and Florida, though its legality is complicated. Additionally, the time difference from France to the U.S. will create much more advantageous live viewing in the morning and continuing through the middle of the day.

“This [year’s Olympics] seems to fit in more for viewing and betting… So I think it’s a better time to view and viewing means betting,” Avello said. “I think the last one in Tokyo, we were coming off of Covid and people were interested in getting back into it again, but I’m not sure that it grabbed the bettors as well as it could have. I think this one will do much better.”

Caesars Sportsbook says it expects “to produce anywhere from 8-10 times the handle that we took for Tokyo 2020.”

To fully maximize, the books are going all out with their offerings. ESPN BET currently has over 300 Olympic markets available, with more to come as the games progress, and is using the event to debut offerings in field hockey, handball, badminton and water polo. The Olympic markets will also be different from what bettors are used to because they allow for wagering on the same athlete or team for multiple events, as well as betting on medal counts.

American sprinting stars Sha’Carri Richardson and Noah Lyles will each run in the 100-meter and 200-meter individual events and participate in the 4x100m relay and are both among DraftKings’ most-bet athletes thus far. But for the unprecedented number of options available and promotions that are sure to follow, Zagorsky’s research still shows that the Olympics are not generally a big driver of handle, even with the convenient Western European location for American audiences.

“The popularity and the betting activity will naturally be greater than what you saw in the last Summer Games, but I don’t think it’s nearly to the point where it’s a material impact on sportsbooks,” says Bichsel. “I think it’s certainly not popular in comparison to weeks one through five of the NFL or the first weekend of March Madness or a Super Bowl, frankly, even with the Olympics taking place over several weeks.”

Regardless of handle, the two-week Olympics should provide a nice change of pace for both bettors and operators — and an opportunity for many bettors to rally behind their country with their wallets.