All Tour de France Bets Are Off as Bennett Misses the Race
The 2021 Tour de France does not begin until this Saturday but there has already been a major shakeup in the Tour de France betting with news that Sam Bennett will miss the race through injury.
Deceuninck-Quick-Step has five victories already in 2021, winning time trials in Belgium, Denmark, Czechia and Portugal ©jackmac34/Pixabay
Last year the Irish rider won two stages of the Tour and took the green jersey award, better known as the points classification, at the expense of Peter Sagan. Sagan started the race as an overwhelming Tour de France green jersey favourite as the betting experts confidentially expected the Slovakian to claim the accolade for an eighth time in nine years.
Popular Mark Cavendish Fills the Void
Bennett’s Deceuninck-QuickStep team has replaced him with Mark Cavendish, the 36-year-old veteran from the Isle of Man who is riding for his third team in three years. A class act with a remarkable 30 Tour de France stage victories on his CV, Cavendish would be a popular winner of any of the Tour’s 21 stages as he is the most decorated sprinter in the history of the race.
But the rider, nicknamed the ‘Manx Missile’, has been in the wilderness for a long time and has not won a stage of any grand tour for almost five years. Consequently, his Tour de France green jersey odds are a dismissive 12/1.
Slovenia’s Strong Hand
In the race for the overall title and the coveted yellow jersey the leading online sportsbooks can barely separate last year’s 1-2 home. Slight preference is for the defending champion, Tadej Pogacar, ahead of his Slovenian countryman Primoz Roglic. They are trading at 6/4 and 2/1 respectively in Betway’s latest Tour de France betting lists.
22-year-old Pogacar – who rides for the UAE Team Emirates – not only won the 2020 Tour, he also claimed the young rider (white jersey) and mountains classification (polka dot jersey) titles. That makes him the only rider in history to claim all three classifications in the one Tour.
Roglic, who was 59 seconds adrift of Pogacar after more than 87 hours in the saddle last year, has spent much of the past two months training at altitude camps in the Sierra Nevada. He resurfaced to win last week’s Tour of Slovenia but he is downplaying his chances of winning this year’s Tour.
Talking to France’ RMC Sport earlier this week the 31-year-old said: “I don’t consider myself as the favourite, I am not the defending champion, I haven’t raced for a while so I will go there and see how it goes.
“And I always repeat now that it’s a new year, there are a lot of guys who are super-strong and are capable of winning. It’s not just a fight between me and Tadej. You have 20 other guys. We need to go there, do our best with our guys and see what it means with the result.”
Thomas 11/2 to Regain the Title
Genuine rivals may be an exaggeration, but the best Tour de France Bookmaking sites agree that Roglic and Pogacar will have some meaningful resistance from 2018 Tour de France winner Geraint Thomas.
The Welshman missed last year’s tour but was runner-up in 2019 and has advertised his current wellbeing by taking podiums in the Volta a Catalunya and Critérium du Dauphiné while winning last month’s Tour de Romandie. Thomas is top-priced is top-priced 11/2 with William Hill making him a very attractive each-way play.
