On Reflection, Burke will be hoping that his patience pays

PATIENCE — and a lorry-load of it — has been required by Karl Burke when training Quiet Reflection this year, but that will look like time well invested if the filly wins tomorrow’s British Champions Sprint at Ascot. With significant rain predicted to provide the soft ground Quiet Reflection needs, Burke’s confidence is rising to a point which would have seemed unlikely when she sustained a pelvic stress fracture in her final gallop before Royal Ascot in June. Burke’s fellow owners were close to drawing stumps on a racing career that had seen her land two Group One races in 2016 and transform from a £44,000 buy into a galloping asset worth at least £2million. Burke (right) said: ‘The other owners thought I was mad and that she was finished. But I was always as confident as you can be with any horse that we would get her back.’ And that happened when Quiet Reflection romped home in a Group Three race at Naas last month, her first run since an unplaced comeback in May. Burke added: ‘She has to step her game up again, but I think she will. She looks a real mature sprinting filly now.’ Even just a place for Quiet Reflection will take Burke to £1million in prize money for the second successive season. He is a more relaxed trainer than before he served a one-year ban in 2009 for falling foul of new inside information rules, a breach which was more naive than malicious. The 12 months Burke spent away from Spigot Lodge stable in Middleham, North Yorkshire, could have finished the family business. Horse numbers dropped from 80 to 20, but by spring next year that will have risen to 130, an expansion based on consistently buying good horses to sell on. They include Libertarian, bought for £42,000 and second in the 2013 Derby after being sold to Godolphin. Burke said: ‘People stood by us. Once you start training winners again you repay that faith. We work the sales hard. We know the type of horse we like.’