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The final tallies are out and the big winners at this year’s London Olympics was not the athletes but rather the online bookmakers.
An estimated £80-100 Million is believed to have been wagered on the London Olympics, according to Sporting Index. Initial forecasts called for somewhere between £20-£40m.
“We made a conscious decision 18 months ago to invest heavily in our trading team, algorithms and modeling for the Olympics and we’ve been rewarded with unprecedented levels of interest,” noted Mark Maydon, commercial director at the Sporting Index Group.
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Ladbrokes forecasts the industry will have taken in almost £80m for the entire two week period, compared with £4m from the Beijing Games in 2008.
It was not immediately clear as to how the books performed in terms of wins/losses, however, football betting specifically resulted in big wins for the bookmakers, especially with Mexico’s shocking gold medal victory against heavily favored Brasil.
Great Britain walking away with the third largest medal count probably didn’t help matters, however.
- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com Business
