£100m bet on London 2012 Olympics

Close to £100m is estimated to have been bet on the recent London 2012 Olympics with operator Sporting Index reporting record turnover.

Nine times as many bets were placed by the spread betting operator’s customers compared to four years ago during the Games in Beijing in 2008.

Close to three quarters (70%) of its customers that had been active betting with the operator in the past three weeks had at least one bet on the Olympics it found, with one in three clients placing bets via hand-held devices.

The number of markets during the 30th Olympiad also more than doubled compared to Beijing (16 sports) with Sporting Index taking bets on all 36 sports with bets placed on every one of the 302 medal events. The top betting sports were found to be football and tennis, however swimming, basketball, athletics, boxing and cycling all proved popular, it said.

The company has invested heavily in its trading team, algorithms and modelling for the Olympics in the last 18 months with Mark Maydon, commercial director at the Sporting Index Group saying that the company had been “rewarded with unprecedented levels of interest”.

One of the firm’s best performing markets was the total number of gold medals that the Great Britain team would win. The initial quote was 24, but after a sluggish start many of Sporting Index’s big clients sold (bet lower) than that figure, forcing the prediction down to 20. That meant the operator was probably the only bookmaker cheering on Team GB with “each and every medal greeted with glee on the trading floor”, a spokesman said today.

Sporting Solutions, its B2B software and data services division that provides a number of bookmakers with a fixed-odds pricing service founded that turnover was much higher than expected when gathering feedback from its customers. Initial estimates had suggested somewhere between £20m to £40m would be bet in the UK, but the final figure was between £80m to 100m.