Anchor & Hope Farm stallion Holy Boss was represented by his first stakes winner on Saturday, Aug. 6, at Laurel Park, when Vance Scholars captured the Bald Eagle Derby by two and a half lengths. 

Making his 3-year-old debut after being sidelined since November due to a condylar fracture, Vance Scholars went to the front and never looked back in the mile and three-sixteenths off-the-turf test. The chestnut gelding is owned by Steven T. Newby, trained by Dale Capuano, and ridden by Jorge Ruiz. He was purchased for $22,000 by Newby at the 2020 Fasig-Tipton Midlantic Eastern Fall Yearling Sale. Bred by Anchor & Hope Farm out of the Cat Thief mare Passionate Dancer, he is a half-brother to stakes winners Fast Pass and Reflector, and multiple Group 1-placed Ojos de Hielo.

Graded stakes-winning sprinter Holy Boss won six times from 22 starts, earning $771,527. Tabbed a TDN Rising Star at 2 when taking his career debut at Churchill Downs by 10¼ lengths, the Steve Asmussen trainee recorded a four-race win streak early in his 3-year-old season that included three straight stakes – Oaklawn Park’s Bachelor, Pimlico’s Chick Lang Stakes, both at six furlongs in 1:09 and change, and Saratoga’s Grade 2 Amsterdam, completing six and a half furlongs in 1:15.38. A four-time stakes winner, he was six times stakes placed, twice in Grade 1 company, with a second in the Alfred G. Vanderbilt Handicap and third in the King’s Bishop at Saratoga. He ran fourth behind Runhappy in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint-G1 at Keeneland.

Holy Boss stood his first U.S. season in 2018 at Louis and Grace Merryman’s Anchor & Hope Farm in Port Deposit after retiring from the track in late spring 2017 and covering his first mares in Argentina that fall. A dual-hemisphere stallion in each of his first four breeding seasons, the 10-year-old chestnut son of Street Boss has sired additional stakes-placed runners Al Loves Josie and Sparkle Sprinkle in his first U.S. crop, and stakes-placed Sol Y Boss in Argentina. 

Out of the Holy Bull mare Holy Grace, Holy Boss is a half-brother to Canadian champion 3-year-old filly Holy Helena, a four-time graded stakes and earner of $1,330,018 who won the 2017 Queen’s Plate Stakes against males at a mile and a quarter.

As of Aug. 8, Holy Boss ranks 10th among Maryland stallions with 13 winners from 30 runners. He stood the 2022 season for $2,500 live foal.