Olympic Games - Men's Cycling Road Race - 5AM EST
The men's cycling road race will be run on a flat parcours that should really make the winner of this race be discussed on a sprint. There is just one difficulty on the profile (9 x Box Hill - 4.58 km @3.4%, final climb ends at 48.9km from the finish), so even if some teams like Spain or the Netherlands would like to make this race quite selective, I don't think they will be able to make such thing happen with such an easy profile, especially with the home team of Great Britain having four great riders in Bradley Wiggins (Tour de France winner), Chris Froome (Tour de France runner up), David Miller (former ITT world champion) and Ian Stannard (current UK champion and one of the hardest working domestiques in the peloton) to help Mark Cavendish in getting into the final km of the race in perfect conditions to discuss the sprint for the win.
This is exactly what I think it will happen. Even with some quality riders trying to escape the peloton, the British team should be able to get everybody back in the peloton on the flat roads near London to make this race be discussed in a mass sprint. When that happens, as we saw in the Champs-Élysés last Sunday, Mark Cavendish is just too good for everybody, including other good sprinters such as Andre Greipel, Matthew Goss or Sacha Modolo. Cavendish won last year's World Championships and the Summer Olympics' Test Event in the roads of London on similar circumstances and therefore, with the help of such a great team, I expect him to give Great Britain a gold medal in the first official day of the Olympic Games.
NOTE: Also available on Bovada @ -137 / 1.73
Pick: 3 units (Single Dime Play) on Mark Cavendish to win @ +110 / 2.10 on Pinnacle
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