2024 Olympics Betting: New Zealand's Best Hopes For Gold
Weight of numbers doesn’t always convert to medals at an Olympic Games, but at Tokyo 2020 New Zealand’s largest ever team produced their best performance in 36 years, coming home with a haul of seven gold medals.
Three came from the rowers, three from canoeing star Lisa Carrington (including a K-2 gold with Caitlin Regal) and one from the dominant women’s rugby sevens team, who are warm favourites with New Zealand betting sites to go back-to-back in 2024.
This time there will be 195 Kiwi athletes in the village, compared with 212 last time, but the three sports they won gold in three years ago should again be their strongest disciplines, along with track cycling where they have 16 riders entering competition.
Interestingly, Nielsen’s Gracenote supercomputers have projected just four gold medals this time around: their algorithms have predicted New Zealand’s men and women to do the rugby sevens double, along with gold medals for Carrington and for track cyclist Ellesse Andrews.
We’ve studied betting Olympic markets across a range of New Zealand betting apps to select what we think are five (but not necessarily the top five) gold medal chances amongst the New Zealand contingent.
At The Top Of The Pack - Or Is That Maul Or Scrum - Is…
The defending Olympic champions fell short at both the Commonwealth Games and the World Cup in 2022, but were reasonably dominant in the two most recent Seven’s World Series’.
Six consecutive victorious legs in the 2022/23 series were followed up with four straight across the 2023/24 season, before a ‘forgive and forget’ 21-19 loss to Australia in the championship semi-finals in Madrid.
More than half of their 2024 squad won gold in 2021, including all-time leading try scorers Portia Woodman-Wickliffe and Michaela Blyde who between them have accumulated more than 500 career tries in 7-a-side rugby.
They appear to be peaking at the right time, along with their male colleagues, but unlike the chaps don’t have a great deal of strong competition outside of neighbours and archrivals Australia.
Tip: Women’s sevens team to win gold - 1.91 with Bet365
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Andrews To Accelerate To Ascendancy
Tokyo silver medallist Ellesse Andrews will be competing in her second Olympics at the age of 24 and is a potentially underrated chance to win the sprint and/or the keirin in the women’s category in Paris.
She’ll have to get past British legend Emma Finucane on both occasions, but Ellesse presents especially excellent value in both disciplines on Olympic betting sites, particularly after the 2022 Commonwealth Games where she won both the keirin and the sprint ahead of Finucane.
Looking to even more recent form, Andrews was the triumphant gold medallist in the keirin at the 2023 UCI World Championships whilst finishing third to Finucane in the sprint.
If that holds, a price of 5.80 on Betovo for Andrews to go one better in the Olympic keirin race looks quite attractive.
Tip: Ellesse Andrews to win the women’s keirin - 5.8 @ Betovo
Pursuing The Gold They Narrowly Missed 11 Months Ago
Four of Andrews’ compatriots will also be hoping to take one step forward and convert the silver they earned at the women’s Team Pursuit event of the 2023 Worlds into a gold.
New Zealand has selected the same quartet - Bryony Botha, Michaela Drummond, Emily Shearman and Ally Wollaston - that finished one second behind Great Britain at that event.
Without Wollaston, the other three plus Nicole Shields won a 4000m team pursuit event at the UCI Track Nations Cup in Hong Kong earlier this year to retain their place at the top of the world rankings for the women’s team pursuit.
Little wonder then that they’re among the favourites once again, with a price of 3.3 with 22Bet.
Tip: Women’s team pursuit to win gold - 3.3 @ 22Bet
A Kerrific High Jump Final Awaits
New Zealand high jumper Hamish Kerr has firmed considerably with New Zealand bookmakers after he too appears to be timing his run to the Olympics perfectly.
At the pre-Olympics Diamond League event in London earlier this month, Kerr won a third consecutive Diamond League crown by being the only man to clear a bar set at 2.30 metres, albeit without Qatar’s defending Olympic champion Mutaz Essa Barshim who was a late withdrawal.
The encouraging thing for Kerr at this Olympic games is that he perhaps could have gone even higher than his winning height of 2.30m, having successfully cleared every single attempt at the first time of asking.
News reports suggest that he declined the chance to test himself at even greater heights after battling an illness during his preparation for the event in London, instead opting to rest up with the Olympics in mind.
2.37m was the winning height at Tokyo in 2021 - one centimetre above Kerr’s personal best of 2.36m - in an iconic final that produced one of the highlights of the entire games when Barshim and Italy’s Gianmarco Tamberi agreed to share the gold medal after an epic battle.
If he’s at his best, and/or leading rivals Barshim and Tamberi aren’t, he could very well shake up this event.
Tip: Hamish Kerr to win high jump gold - 3.7 with BetVictor
Another Boilover On The Rapids?
Dame Lisa Carrington is expected to add to her already coveted title as New Zealand’s most decorated Olympian, with bookmakers grading her as a very short-priced favourite to win the K-1 500m kayaking race the day after teaming up with Alicia Hoskin in the pairs.
There were some interesting results in the lead-up to these Games when, at two separate regattas in May, Carrington’s compatriot Aimee Fisher beat her by the barest of margins in both Hungary and in the Canoe Sprint World Championships in Poland.
Fisher told reporters after the most recent win that she expects the five-time gold medallist to raise the bar in Paris and is remaining grounded despite those two nail-biting victories.
Many pundits also expect Carrington to step up at crunch time, but if Fisher can maintain the closeness of the gap between the two, a price of 2.37 at RTbet for Fisher to win gold could be value.
Tip: Aimee Fisher to win the women’s K-1 500m race - 2.37 @ RTbet
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