Pedigree Query

By FIFTY SIX INA ROW (1981).Stakes winner of $355,650,National Sprint
Championship S.-G3-ntr,etc.Sire of 11 crops of racing age,110 foals,
75 starters, 40 winners of 90 races and earning $888,781 in N.A., in-
cluding Mi Profe ($115,513, 3rd Fairplex Breeders' Cup S. (FPX, $3,-
822)),Tioga Summit ($38,599, 3rd Gateway to Glory S. [L] (FPX, $6,-
000)),Teach Us ($31,425, 3rd Black Swan S. (FPX, $4,800)), Consecu-
tively (3rd Redwood Empire S. (SR, $4,500)). Sire of dams of winners.

Don and his dad were also successful with importing hors-
es from Argentina, namely the stakes winners Lucie Manet
and Star Ball. Those, however, paled in comparison to his
dad’s homebred Dimaggio, the West Coast’s leading juvenile
colt of 1974. Sired by the unraced Bold Ruler stallion Bold
Hitter and named for Hall of Fame baseball slugger Joe
DiMaggio, the colt became the first Valpredo horse to cap-
ture a $100,000 race when he won the grade II Hollywood
Juvenile Championship, over fellow Cal-bred The Bagel
Prince, in stakes record time of 1:08 3/5.
Dimaggio also ran third in the Del Mar Futurity and set a
1 1/16-mile track record at Fresno while winning the Harvest
Handicap at four. He retired to Old English Rancho with
$177,600 in earnings. Widely underrated as a stallion, he
sired a pair of California champions in Prince Spellbound
and Purdue King and countless stakes-winning fillies that
became prolific broodmares.
“Dimaggio was very symbolic of my family’s success in the
Thoroughbred industry,” Valpredo added. “We still have
many horses in our program that trace back to him.”
Don also had the great fortune to be associated with that
stallion’s good son, Fifty Six Ina Row. A third generation
homebred for the Valpredo family, the colt was so named to
commemorate DiMaggio’s 1941 hitting streak of 56 straight.
The equine version made headlines at three when he upset
Precisionist in the 1984 National Sprint Championship at
Hollywood Park, setting a new six furlong track record of
1:09 2/5 in the process.Even though Fifty Six Ina Row scored two more stakes
wins and broke Hollywood’s track record for seven furlongs,
this earner of $355,650 never received a state-bred champi-
onship. That would come a few years later, when the family’s
Purdue King captured four stakes en route to honors as Cali-
fornia’s champion juvenile male of 1987. He ran unplaced in
Winning Colors’ Kentucky Derby the following year.
Dimaggio is also the maternal grandsire of Soviet Prob-
lem, the brilliant filly Don bred and raced with John Harris.
Voted California’s Horse of the Year in 1994, the daughter of

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