The confidence has always been there – in himself and his horses.

For the first time in his training career, Mike Puype has more than 60 horses in his care, including a team of 30 that will race at Del Mar this summer. It is a group that could provide Puype with a more visible role nationwide in coming weeks.

“My arrow is going up,” he said last weekend.

ETOBICOKE, Ontario – R Unpainted Dancer’s rise from a low-level claimer to a thriving Ontario-sired allowance performer has been one of the unsung success stories at the Woodbine meet. She will try to win her second race in a row in Thursday’s feature, an Ontario-sired allowance route for nonwinners of three.

ETOBICOKE, Ontario – Although he may argue otherwise, Saturday will not be just another day at the office for Woodbine announcer Danny Loiselle.

The 59-year-old Loiselle took over as the Thoroughbred racecaller here at Woodbine on July 23, 1986, and will be marking his silver anniversary.

Loiselle’s career in the booth was just the latest phase in a career that began with the Ontario Jockey Club on Aug. 1, 1967. That brings his sum total of years with the company, which now is known as the Woodbine Entertainment Group, to 44.

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.