Olympic Futures: France Gold Medal Total

How will the host country fare this year? And how can we profit from it?

Here at SLP, our primary focus is on watching and betting football, but since we still have a while before the season kicks off, let's see if we can make money somewhere else first. The opening ceremonies of the 2024 Paris games are almost here, so it’s time to get in those future bets and we have a great one for you today. Historically, the host country sees a bump in both gold medals and total medals.

There are a couple of reasons for this, starting with the obvious homefield advantage and having a higher portion of the crowd cheering you on. There is a lot of debate about the value of homefield advantage across different sports, but it certainly can’t hurt.

But the main reason for this bump is automatic qualifiers. There are a number of sports where the host country automatically gets to play, without having to go through qualifiers like all of the other countries. This leaves the host country with more competitors and an obvious advantage.

But if we really stop and think about it, how much advantage is there to automatic qualifiers? If they’re good, they would have qualified anyway. And if they’re not that good, then the chances of them winning a gold medal aren’t very good. Of course, that’s why they play the games, so once they’re on the court/field/track/pitch/pool anything can happen, but it’s statistically unlikely that all of the auto qualifiers win gold.

Additionally, the host nation bump has typically been overestimated by the betting market. Below we have a table listing the number of gold medals that France has won in each Olympics for the last 30 years. The average gold medal bump for a host country is 7, so if we add that to each of France’s actual gold medal counts, we get a high of 22 and an average of 18.

And lastly, there will be 11 less gold medals given out this summer compared with the last summer games (held in ‘21, but still technically called the 2020 games). This is due to the removal of several sports from the Olympic field.

So while there’s no such thing as a sure thing, there’s definitely value on the current number of under 24.5 gold medals for France