Common sense v lack of knowledge

I know very little about cycling - or more particularly about competitive cycling. The Tour de France is a puzzle to me in the sense that it seems like a lot of ground to cover to find yourself separated by a relatively small amount of time from your competitors at the end of the three weeks or whatever it is.

Today's Olympic road race around some very scenic parts of South West London and Surrey however was easy enough to grasp. The first man past the post would win gold. The first man from around 150 cyclists. Over a 250 km course with some very twisty bits around Box Hill (nine times! - one circuit of which, I'm sure, would have put old gun in a six foot box!).

I work most Saturdays and, for some reason, trading on Betfair is not permitted in the showroom. But when I nipped out for a well earned B&H, at about 11 o'clock I think, I fired up the Bf app on my phone and saw Cavendish available to lay at 1.92. This reminded me of an article I'd read in the paper during the week which suggested that the layout of the Olympic course didn't really suit his style and that there might be several banana skins laying in wait for him. The closest priced rider when I looked was in the mid teens. Obviously there was still a long way to go, but from Cassini's blog I see that he was trading as low as the 1.4's at about 3 pm, and was some 9 minutes behind the leading pack of riders.

None of this made much sense to me. If the prices being offered, and taken, truly represented value at the time that implies that at about 11 o'clock he had better than a 50% chance of winning, and that at three ish, nine minutes adrift and in a big pack of riders, that he had a 70% ish chance of winning. With the distance still to be covered, the opportunity for crashing, never mind 140 other riders all presumably wanting to win the gold medal (and some of them, presumably, capable of so doing) - were these %'s accurate? As it transpires, obviously not!

I didn't lay Cavendish for three main reasons. Firstly, as I stated in opening this post I know nothing of the sport. Secondly because of  the hype surrounding the race, and 'expert' analysis suggesting an early British gold medal. But largely I ignored because in combining reasons one and two and in looking at the market I honestly thought he only really had to manage not to fall off his bike to win!

The annoying thing is that it just didn't 'look' or 'feel' right to this cycling ignoramus. Another example of where 'gut feel' would have paid handsomely.

As an aside I referred above to 'expert' analysis. A cynical ex colleague of mine once offered an amusing definition of 'expert' - namely a situation where 'ex' is the unknown factor and a 'spurt' is a drip under pressure. If the cap fits, eh?