Cycling the surprise star in Betfair's Olympics

Betfair has recorded its best ever Olympics with the men’s cycling road race and Great Britain’s strong performance among the contributing factors, the operator has revealed.

The road race, in which Tour de France champion Bradley Wiggins competed, saw more customers place bets than in any of the British team’s football matches, thanks largely to mobile betting.

Some 40% of bets placed on the race were via mobile devices, described by a Betfair spokesman as “An extremely high figure for any event,” perhaps due in part to the fact that it was one of few free-to-attend events and saw an estimated one million spectators in attendance.

In terms of overall betting volume the traditionally popular sports of tennis and football remained highest, while the stand-out event for the number of actives was the men’s 100m final. Betfair’s total number of customers making bets doubled to just under 100,000. The men’s 100-metre final saw 19,000 individual customers place bets on the outcome of the race, Betfair said.

“The Olympic Cycling Road Race is one of the clearest examples yet of mobile changing the established order ““ the amount of customers getting involved in a live event on their mobile app lifted this right into our top 10 for active customers, when ordinarily it would have had not have enjoyed the same popularity,” the spokesman added.

Sporting Index and Ladbrokes have both said that the Games saw between £80 to £100m in sports betting turnover compared to £4m four years ago in Bejing.

Since the arrival of Yahoo veteran Raj Velmulapali in May 2011, Betfair has made significant progress with its mobile offering to supplement its sports betting app, one of the first of its kind to be approved for inclusion in Apple’s app store. The operator’s native iPad app, the first from its San Francisco development studio, was released in February this year.