How significant is the instructor’s role in trotting competitions? In light of the statistics, it seems that each driver’s impact on success is surprisingly large.
- Steering has changed.
- There is even talk of a “Santtu supplement” in the case of Suomalaištehti Santtu Raitala.
- The instructor’s influence on the final result of the trotting competition is surprisingly large.
The best Finnish trotting instructors compete in approximately 1,500 races each year. At the end of the last decade, he became number one, now 34 years old Santtu Raitala has won more than four hundred trotting starts a year at his best.
How many of these victories are due to Raitala’s skill?
How many wins would a slightly weaker jockey have taken if instead of Raitala, he had been able to control all the horses that Raitala controlled during the year?
Who decides in the end – the horse or the handler?
Younger than before
Trotting has been revolutionized in the past ten years or so, when the younger knee has come into the limelight.
Even in the early years of the 21st century, most of the top instructors were 40–50 years old and almost exclusively men. Since then, those born in the 1990s and 2000s have been at the top of the statistics.
Born in 1992 Hannu Torvinen was the comet of 2013 after winning 159 starts and finishing third in the drivers’ league Ari Moilanen (225 wins) and Harri Koivunen (180 wins) after. Last year, Torvinen had won only 34 trotting starts.
Santtu Raitalak also made his rise to the driver elite, winning 57 starts. Twenty Iikka Nurmonen fanned 46 times.
How has guiding changed?
Hannu Torvinen was the comet of 2013. Maisa Hyttinen
In trotting, about 40 percent of the starts are won from the lead position, if the front horse is defined as the team that has led the start after running a kilometer.
The top drivers of previous years, the tops who are still actively driving, such as Jorma Kontio, Antti Teivainen, Pekka Korpi and Ari Moilanen took and continue to take the majority of their successes after starting in the early stages of the start. Of their thousands of wins over the years, most have come from the lead.
On the other hand, more than 61 percent of current top manager Santtu Raitala’s profits in the 2020s have come from places other than management. So, in the starts he drives, he takes relatively fewer lead wins than the average driver.
Santtu Raitala almost never invests in the beginning so that he doesn’t get the coveted leadership position. If he lurches to the bow, it often happens after a fairly moderate first few hundred meters. If the young virtuoso thinks that some opponents are strongly on the way with frontal tactics, Raitala usually guesses this and prefers to take a slow start, moving towards the top group when the pace is at its calmest, or really often gets to the top only at the very end.
Often, the profit margin of the Pihitputaan is very small, tens of cents. It applies to bow wins as well as letter wins. Only what is necessary is taken out of the horse, nothing extra. Raitala’s riders often come to the finish line with strength. There would often be hundreds of meters of speed around the goal.
The same applies to many other drivers of the younger generation. In the 2020s, Hannu Torvinen, who wins the second most trotting starts, has only taken 40 percent of his wins from the lead position and 60 percent from other running positions.
The difference to many of the most experienced drivers is significant. For example, Pekka Korpi takes more than 70 percent of his profits from the leadership position.
What is the meaning of each?
More than 61 percent of Raitala’s profits in the 2020s have come from other than management positions. Maisa Hyttinen
This is not an easy question. Let’s simplify so that we compare Raitala with drivers ranked 40–50 in the Kuskiranking.
There you can find such names as the already mentioned Korpi, Janita Antti-Roiko, Jukka-Pekka Kauhanen and Antti Ala-Rantala. Each of them are top class professionals, but all profiled more as coaches than as instructors. Drivers of this caliber take at least twenty wins a year, when several hundred starts accumulate.
They belong to the top five percent of Finnish drivers, as well over a thousand drivers wear the driving suit annually.
From time to time, the aforementioned coaches hand over the reins to Raitala, which is directly reflected in the odds. The vernacular is spoken From the Santtu supplement that is, about how much the odds are lower when Santtu Raitala is guiding a certain horse compared to if the horse’s trainer would also act as a guide.
How much is the Santtu supplement?
In the case of Raitala, we are talking about the “Santtu supplement”, which can be seen on betting sites. Maisa Hyttinen / Finnish Hippos
In the case of less played horses, the game percentages may increase multiple times (i.e. the odds are lower), for example when Raitala gets a feel for a horse normally controlled by JP Kauhanen, which Santtuk has controlled quite often.
If it is an underdog whose probability of victory is estimated by the players to be one percent when Kauhanen is guiding, the percentage of the same horse in the corresponding task when Raitala is guiding is at least 3–4 percent. If in Kauhanen’s hands the game percentage would be in the order of ten, when Raitala is sitting on the driver’s bench, the game share will roughly double.
In the case of favourites, the rise is more moderate. When Kauhanen or another top-40–50 driver changes, Raitalaa’s percentage increases from around 30 percent to close to 50 percent.
Is the supplement too big?
If Santtu Raitalaa had played in the winning game for every start in the 2020s in which he has coached, the wallet would have been lighter by around 7.8 euros for every hundred played. When the return of the winning game, i.e. the share paid to the players for the change of game, is 88 percent, it can be stated that playing Raitala would have been clearly better than the average driver.
Thus, the Santtu supplement has not gone overboard, but on the contrary, the coefficients have still remained at an unnecessarily high level.
For the above-mentioned top-40–50 drivers, the return percentage would have been roughly 88 percent, which means that the players have correctly assessed the winning margins of the horses they steered.
So it seems that Raitala easily carries every extra gaming euro directed at him and the calculated odds. Brilliant controls haven’t led to the odds collapsing too much – quite the opposite.
Raitala with a buggy collapses the odds, but still makes the horses he controls better betting targets in the long run, because their success improves so much.
How much would others win?
Iikka Nurmonen is one of the toughest directors at the moment. Maisa Hyttinen
From the statistics presented above, it can be concluded that if Raitala took a hundred wins in his races, the top 40-50 drivers would have reached about fifty top places in similar tasks – at most. Every other win that Raitala managed would have been missed.
So does that mean that the rider is more important than the horse?
I leave this conclusion to the reader, but it is clear that the winning percentage of many trainers could increase very significantly, even almost double on an annual basis, if instead of a trainer who normally guides their horses in competitions, there was a driver who belongs to the top ten in Finland.
How do others compare to the star?
At the top of the driver ranking, the differences are not very big.
In Atleet’s driver ranking, the seven best instructors stand out a bit from the others. After the stripe Tuukka Varisthe Torvinen brothers, Iikka Nurmonen and a little older, who had already guided the invasion of young drivers in a similar style Mika Forss and Tommi Kylliainen would turn almost nine times out of ten to the winner’s presentation, if instead of the victorious Raitala, they had been on the driver’s seat.
The top names in the next basket, Ari Moilanen, Jorma Kontio and other top 20 drivers, would win approximately 80 percent of Raitala’s wins.
Everyone’s role is decisive
The importance of the director is great. Maisa Hyttinen
The importance of the drivers is therefore inevitably very big. Sure, the horse does a real athletic performance, but even the best running performance is not necessarily enough to win if the driving performance is not successful.
Therefore, the horse’s wishes would be to have as good a driver as possible, so that success would at least be due to the running mood. Competition performance would also be lighter in most cases.
If in the biggest trotting competitions, such as the T75 starts, the drivers were mainly drivers in the top 20, it would mean that the best horse would win more and more often. Even the starting track draw would not be so meaningful, when timely solutions with strollers would compensate for a bad draw.
Athlete has published a slightly more extensive article on the subject. The article also contains a link to the Swedish Breeders Crown final for 4-year-old stallions and geldings, which took place in November. That’s Sweden’s top drivers Mats E. Djuse, Orjan Kihlström, Daniel Wäjersten and Johan Untersteiner show what the trot start of the future will be like.
Remember the peaks of the western neighbor Magnus A. Djuse and Carl Johan Jepson too are involved, but this time not in the strollers of the hottest favorites.
Are Sweden’s top drivers still like Raitala? I would say not really, although they are amazing.
A longer version of the article can be read at atleetti.fi.