Karl Richard Burke was born over the Black Swan pub in Rugby on May 17, 1963. The family later moved across town to the Red Lion which his father ran for 16 years. During his time at the Red Lion Karl gained his first interest in racing through watching it with his dad. He was given a pony and competed on the pony club circuit, then started riding out for local Rugby trainer Chris O’Neill when he was 14.
Karl became apprenticed to Alan Jarvis, first at Withybrook, in Warwickshire, and then at Royston, in Hertfordshire. He rode his first winner when aged 17 on just his second ride in public for Jarvis, aboard The Britisher in an apprentice race at Hamilton on June 30, 1980. That was his only success on the Flat.
Always likely to be too heavy for the Flat, he switched codes to jump racing and went on to ride 46 winners from 750 rides between 1983 and 1990. The first of those was on novice hurdler Bloemfontein for trainer Michael Chapman at Newton Abbot on August 1, 1983.
The best horse he rode was Kildimo, on whom he won novice hurdles at Bangor and Worcester in the 1985/86 season when the gelding was trained by Alan Jarvis. Karl later married Jarvis’s daughter Elaine. They had two daughters Kelly and Lucy.
He rode as stable jockey for John White for two years and achieved his best score of 10 winners in the 1988/89 season. He won a total of eight races on White’s chaser Sohail including the Virginia Gold Cup at Stratford in September 1989. However, he decided he was no longer enjoying race riding as much as he used to and announced his retirement in the spring of 1990. Sohail gave him last success when winning the Brent Walker Handicap Chase at Plumpton on March 30, 1990.
By then, Karl’s interests had turned to training. He and Elaine had already set up a 27-box livery and pre-training yard at Barnby-in-the-Willows, near Newark where they broke in young stock. In 1990 they started training a small string of both Flat and jump horses there. His first winner as a trainer was Temporale in a two-mile handicap hurdle at Towcester on October 11, 1990, ridden by Robbie Supple.
Soon after, the family moved to Broadway near Cheltenham, where they rented a yard from Michael Berrow the manager of pop group Duran Duran. As the string of horses increased, Karl made the decision to move to Ginge, in Oxfordshire, where he enjoyed further success with horses such Daring Destiny, winner of the 1994 Ayr Gold Cup and, in August 1996, a Group 2 in Germany and a Group 3 in Ireland.
Karl’s profile as a trainer continued to grow and in 1998 he moved to High Havens Stables on Hamilton Road in Newmarket. Then in 2000 he and his family bought Spigot Lodge in Middleham, North Yorkshire. There he built up the string to over 100 horses. He enjoyed group race success with Lord Shanakill, who won the Group 2 Mill Reef Stakes in 2008 and the Group 1 Prix Jean Prat at Chantilly on July 5, 2009.
However, just days after registering that first Group 1 win, Karl was disqualified for 12 months after admitting he had supplied inside information for reward to Miles Rodgers, a disqualified person, between May and June 2004.
Having served his suspension, during which time his wife Elaine held the trainer’s licence, Karl was soon back in the big time. Libertarian won the Dante at York in 2013 then finished second in the Derby.
In 2015, he trained Odeliz to win two Group 1 races, the Prix Jean Romanet at Deauville and the Premio Longines Lydia Tesio in Italy, plus a Group 3 in Germany. Quiet Reflection gave him his first Royal Ascot winner in 2016 when winning the Group 1 Commonwealth Cup, following that with another Group 1 victory in the Sprint Cup at Haydock.
In 2017 he saddled Unfortunately to land the Group 2 Prix Robert Papin and the Group 1 Prix Morny. That same year he trained Laurens to win the Group 1 Fillies Mile at Newmarket. In 2018 Laurens added four more Group 1 races to Karl’s tally of top-flight contests, winning the Prix Saint-Alary, the Prix de Diane (French Oaks), Leopardstown’s Matron Stakes and the Sun Chariot Stakes at Newmarket.
