Bookmakers Paddy Power yesterday closed all betting on the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI) presidential election in which Irish Sailing Association nominee Richard Burrows is challenging judo's Pat Hickey. The election takes place on February 15th.

On Thursday the odds favoured the incumbent president Hickey who was heavily fancied at 1 to 6 with outsider Burrows on offer at 4 to 1. But yesterday morning the money began to come in heavily on Burrows, prompting the bookies to take stock.

The original odds came from the fact that Hickey has nine nominations for presidency as opposed to one for Burrows. Support from those nine federations come election time would leave Burrows needing a large percentage of the remaining votes.

However, a spokesman for Paddy Power said: "We took several large bets both on our credit line and in our shops and we had one guy coming on looking for an extremely large bet and seemingly ready to take any price we were willing to offer."

"The guy was willing to put £1,000 on Burrows. For something like this, that would be a huge bet . . . we decided that there is obviously more knowledge out there than we have."

Burrows is hoping to meet with all 27 federations next Saturday at the National Stadium, Dublin.