Who Are the 2024 Summer Olympics’ Biggest Favorites?
Looking at who the betting odds favor the most in Paris.
One of my frequent struggles going into the Olympics — summer or winter — every few years is just a lack of knowledge about who the best athletes are in a bunch of sports that are outside my core interests. (And I’d like to think I have a pretty broad set of sports that I cover!) NBC can do its little human interest packages, but if I don’t know who is good or not, it’s tough for me to really engage with the different competitions.
So with the 2024 Paris Olympics starting, well, technically yesterday — but the Opening Ceremonies are on Friday — I decided to put together a little guide for myself (and hopefully all of you) about who has the best chance to win gold in as many events as FanDuel offers odds.1 The premise is simple: I grabbed the betting odds in each competition, then converted them to implied probabilities and removed the juice. The results should give us a sense of which competitions have the biggest favorites — and the most uncertain ones.
(Note: All of these odds are as of Wednesday evening, July 24, 2024.)
Let’s start with the individual athletes with the highest probability of taking home gold medals, event by event:
Unsurprisingly, American swimmer Katie Ledecky in the Women's 1500m Freestyle has the highest gold-medal probability (78 percent) of any single athlete in any event. Ledecky has owned that world record since 2013, setting and re-setting it six different times; she is also the only gold medalist in the event’s history (it was only added to the program in 2020). We wrote a lot of great stuff about Ledecky’s dominance during my time at FiveThirtyEight — particularly the pieces by my old colleague Ben Morris — so this is a great chance to check those out!
Ledecky has some company among individuals above the 70 percent threshold, including Chinese weightlifter Li Wenwen, Japanese wrestler Yui Susaki and Canadian swimmer Summer McIntosh — who will be looking to dominate an event she holds her own world record in, the Women's 400m Individual Medley. Interestingly, each of the top four biggest favorites by event at Paris are women, as are five of the top seven — the exceptions being Georgian weightlifter Lasha Talakhadze in the “over 102kg” category and Swedish pole vaulter Armand Duplantis.
As for the most uncertain favorites, I was a bit surprised to see it is American Nelly Korda, by far the best women’s golfer in the world, with just an 11 percent shot at gold. But maybe I shouldn’t be — golf is a notoriously unpredictable sport, and Korda’s counterpart Scottie Scheffler only has a 16 percent chance in the men’s tourney. With the average individual favorite checking in at 37.5 percent adjusted odds, any of these events with chances in the teens for the favorite should be pretty interesting.
Let’s now pivot to looking at the largest (and smallest) team favorites, a list that includes any event with multiple competitors working together:
From Ledecky at the top end on the individual ranking, more American icons take the top spot among the teams — the U.S. women’s basketball team has an 81 percent probability of winning gold in Paris. That’s another favorite which isn’t too surprising; Team USA has won each of the past seven golds in women’s basketball, going back nearly 30 years. The men’s team is a bit lower, at 71 percent, though it has only failed to win gold once in eight tries since NBA players became eligible to play in the Olympics.
But I’ll stop being too jingoistic with my analysis here. For instance, China owns three of the top five (and four of the top seven) most favored teams at these Olympics, in men’s and women’s diving and table tennis. And the Australian women’s 4 x 200m Freestyle Relay team is a force, having set a new world record at the 2023 championships.
At the other end of things, the weakest favorite is — once again, shockingly — Spain’s star-studded tandem of Carlos Alcaraz and Rafael Nadal in men’s doubles tennis, with a mere 14 percent chance of winning. Sometimes the doubles gold is won by big names, and sometimes not, so that is undoubtedly feeding into the low odds, and Nadal is nearing the end of what has been a brilliant career, but it’s nonetheless surprising to see them be the least impressive favorites of all.
But as I noted earlier, a weak favorite just means a more interesting competition, with greater chances for the rest of the field to win gold. Here’s to enjoying all of the Olympic sports over the next few weeks, no matter whether the favorites fall short or dominate.
Filed under: Olympics
Plus men’s soccer, which don’t have odds on the board at FanDuel — so I pulled them from CBS Sports instead.