Tick Tock
After the impenetrable and seemingly totally random tactics and events of the cycling road races, today turns to a far more transparent Olympic cycling competition, the time trials.
The wheelmen and women each pedal individually round a lengthy (44km for men, 29km for women) circuit of South West London beginning and ending at Hampton Court Palace.
A timed individual sport would seem to lend itself more naturally to statistical analysis, however no two time trials are ever the same, courses, conditions, gradient and context all vary wildly so finding the data relevant to today's races is trickier than it might seem.
A Tour de France stage of a similar length was comfortably won by one Bradley Wiggins (unbeaten in any time trial this year) with second place taken by another GB rider, Chris Froome.
However, if either of these riders is dreaming tonight of snatching the first 2012 GB gold medal, I'm sure they won't mind their dreams being shattered by the 15% combined chances of Emma Pooley and Lizzie Armitstead in the earlier women's time trial. We predict Wiggins and Froome have a chunkier 45% chance of topping the trialists.
Perhaps Clive James will be in the crowd for one of our pre-game predictions of the most certain results, the Men's Gymnastics All-around competition.
Kohei Uchimura certainly has the endurance, along with the skill and strength, to continue his dominance of the all-around competition (we predict a 98% chance of victory), but after some worrying errors in the team competition there may be a sadistic pleasure to be had from watching and waiting for some calamitous errors.
