OMAHA, Neb. – With the heat of summer fully upon the region, racing in Nebraska shifts to Omaha’s Horsemen’s Park for a four-day festival of racing that gets under way Thursday evening with races geared to horses that have raced in the state this year.

DEL MAR, Calif. – Trainer Graham Motion, who won the Kentucky Derby earlier this year with Animal Kingdom, is expected to make a rare Del Mar appearance on Saturday when he sends out the consistent older grass horse Smart Bid in the $300,000 Eddie Read Stakes, the first Grade 1 race of the meet.

DEL MAR, Calif. – Doug O’Neill sent out the final 2-year-old winner of the meet at Hollywood Park on Sunday. At Del Mar, he comes loaded with several promising runners, most notably the Flower Alley colt I’ll Have Another, a powerful debut winner at Hollywood Park who is pointing to the Grade 2, $150,000 Best Pal Stakes on Aug. 7.

O’Neill wins here, and he wins there. Winning! But the colt all admirers of pop-culture references will most follow has to be Adonis D N A, an Unbridled’s Song colt named for an aspect of one of actor Charlie Sheen’s rants.

DEL MAR, Calif. – California’s seven-week summer racing season begins Wednesday at scenic Del Mar, the coastal resort with a racetrack only yards from the Pacific Ocean.

Yet the built-in appeal of summer dates and prime location do not insulate Del Mar from the shortage of California owners and horses that led Santa Anita and Hollywood Park to scale back racing to just four days a week. Del Mar starts out on a five-day plan.

Gulfstream Park owner Frank Stronach has asked Florida regulators to help him implement a program that would phase out all raceday medication, including Lasix, for 3-year-olds at the track, beginning with the 2011-12 meeting.

Overnight purses are set to rise by an eye-catching 20 percent at Del Mar when the meeting opens Wednesday, with the possibility that even more prize money could be offered before the 37-day meeting ends Sept. 7.

Del Mar director of racing Tom Robbins said purse levels may be underestimated since the projections were made following a disappointing Santa Anita meeting earlier this year that saw a 9 percent decline in all-sources handle.

“We’re hoping our purse structure is conservative,” Robbins said.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. – Hollywood Park’s spring-summer meeting ended on Sunday with a decline in average all-sources handle of approximately 2.4 percent, the track’s president, Jack Liebau, said on Monday.

Liebau said that simulcasting in Southern California was down .8 of a percent, and that average out-of-state handle was down “5 to 6” percent. “We did really well in California, relatively speaking, he said.

Liebau said the figures are estimates and that more specific handle figures were being compiled this week.

ETOBICOKE, Ontario – Hollywood Hit, last year’s Canadian champion sprinter, heads an accomplished nine-horse field Wednesday night in the $150,000 Bold Venture Stakes at Woodbine.

Hollywood Hit posted three wins from five starts in 2010. He wound up second in both of his losses, in the Bold Venture and the Grade 3 Phoenix at Keeneland.

Hollywood Hit was a distant fourth after tracking the rapid Essence Hit Man following a seven-month layoff in the May 8 Vigil, a seven-furlong stakes that he won in track-record time last year.

ETOBICOKE, Ontario – Trainer Mark Casse had a rather disappointing Sunday at Fort Erie when Hippolytus, the gelding whom he had sent out for a second-place finish in the Queen’s Plate, failed to build on that effort when fourth in the Prince of Wales.

But things went well enough on the home front in a pair of stakes last weekend as Clement Rock gave Casse his sixth stakes win of the meeting in Saturday’s Toronto Cup and Dene Court and Quality Miss produced a 2-4 finish in Sunday’s Shady Well.

A well-matched field of older horses running in a $22,000 claiming race will serve as Wednesday’s feature at Northlands Park. The 1 1/16-mile race drew six horses, and it is hard to identify a clear favorite.

Trainer Ron Grieves has a solid one-two punch with Alarico and Major Temper who are stepping up after finishing first and second in a $17,500 claiming race July 2. They will run a separate betting interests.