They won’t go so far as to wear hard hats and flak vests. Anyway, a protective cage might be more effective. Whatever defensive crouch they assume, when they submit to public forums Saturday afternoon at Hollywood Park and Sunday morning at Pleasanton the representatives of the Thoroughbred Owners of California board of directors will be braced for a vigorous airing of grievances.

Mike Pegram, who joined the TOC board last year, put it another way.

“What do you wear to a lynching?” he said when asked. “A smile.”

Let the record show that June 10 was the official start of the football season here in Las Vegas.

Granted, we’re still 10 weeks away from the opening Saturday of the college football season and 11 weeks from what is, hopefully, a full NFL season. And sure, NFL Week 1 lines have been up since before the draft in April.

But Friday, June 10, was the day big-time betting on the upcoming season really got under way.

He’s a big, bay handful who refuses to act his age. His competitive history embraces nearly every significant moment of the 21st century. He reappears in the Northwest every spring, just as the rhododendron begin to bloom, and disappears in the fall having done his job as a hard-working member of the Thoroughbred breed.

His name is West Seattle Boy. He is 12 years old, and he doesn’t care who knows it.

Harness racing, with at least one huge story to tell as summer arrives, has turned to a Thoroughbred man to help tell it.

The story is that of See You At Peelers, a 3-year-old pacing filly who has won 18 straight races, has never been beaten, whipped colts in a major stakes at Yonkers Raceway, and has won more than a million dollars, but can’t get a line in major North American newspapers. Her trainer, Jimmy Takter, one of the best in the sport, calls her the Zenyatta of harness racing.

It’s Father’s Day on Sunday, that happy afterthought of a holiday, institutionalized by Presidential proclamation in 1966 right around the same time Lyndon Johnson also announced the U.S. would be increasing its troop strength in Vietnam. A teen at the time, I had yet to cultivate the well-tuned sense of irony required to fully appreciate such twists of history.

The announcement last week that a six-furlong sprint for 2-year-olds will become the 15th Breeders’ Cup race starting this fall has prompted some hand-wringing over the expansion of the Cup lineup in general and an emphasis on speed and precocity in particular. While it’s reasonable to raise such concerns, the new Juvenile Sprint seems on balance like a healthy addition to the program, so long as people keep it in proper perspective.

The 3-year-old boys were a particularly unruly bunch this year, rolling around week after week, messing up the carpet, knocking pictures off the wall. After a while it was tough to tell one from the other, so it was fitting the entire ordeal ended in a mud bath at Belmont last weekend with a Belmont Stakes won by a gelding who stayed away from the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness.

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Jockey Jose Valdivia Jr. after the Belmont.

It was a perfectly honest question, and John Velazquez was happy to oblige with a reply. When he won the Kentucky Derby aboard Animal Kingdom, wondered fellow rider Jose Valdivia, how did it feel?

Ruler On Ice’s victory in the Belmont Stakes brought the Triple Crown to an unsatisfying conclusion. The competition in this spring’s classic races had been subpar, and for the 33rd straight year no horse was going to sweep the three-races series.

We've seen a lot of evidence in recent years that pedigree really separates the contenders from the pretenders in the Belmont. Horses with marginal pedigrees for stamina can win other routes, but not the Belmont, and I think Shackleford will come up light on that score. Animal Kingdom is legitimately the horse to beat. His female family has the mile-and-a-half breeding that you rarely see in U.S. horses.

Belmont Stakes selections

1) Animal Kingdom

2) Nehro

3) Shackleford

4) Master of Hounds