On Sunday, she wrote another triumphant chapter in her remarkable comeback tale, steering the Chris Hardy-trained galloper Zakeriz to a dominant win in the $45,000 Queanbeyan Cup.

A jubilant Burrells returned to scale aboard her favourite horse to rapturous fervour from the heaving Queanbeyan crowd, a world away from the hospital bed she lay in during a three-week coma as doctors desperately fought to save her from severe bleeding on the brain in late 2017.

Emergency surgery saved her life, but Burrells had to rehabilitate talking and walking.

"Apparently I broke my neck and my nose, too, but I don't remember that," Burrells said.

"I remember the jumpout morning, but I don't remember anything after that. The jumpout went really good and then after the post it just fell down on me.

"Friends and family, they all remember it and it was all scary for them but I don't remember it.

"I probably spent a month-and-a-half doing rehab stuff. I had two-and-a-half years off not being allowed to do anything. And I've been back about just over a year."

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Burrells gave nothing else a chance on Sunday on the Wagga seven-year-old, which had been a heavy favourite in the lead-up before a significant betting drift late on as the money came for Canberra stayer Upper House.

Zakeriz patiently worked to the lead from out wide and Burrells didn't panic when the Joe Cleary-trained Subtly Spring took her on at the 600m marker.

Zakeriz booted clear in the final furlong to outlast the favourite Upper House and third-placed Nieces and Nephews.

The win followed on from Zakeriz's dominant Cootamundra Cup salute last month, before he ran eighth in the Country Classic (2000m) at Rosehill two weeks ago.

"I rode him first-up at Wagga and it was only over a mile and we led them up quite well and he just got run down, but he wasn't 100 per cent fit then," Burrells said.

"Then I rode him in the Coota Cup, we did the same and he won.

"The instructions for today were do the same. I jumped, gave him a dig, he got the lead, and he dropped the bit and I was like, 'I hope I'm not going to jam everyone up too much here'.

"They were going to take him on on the corner coming home. He wasn't fading out at all, which was good."

Zakeriz's win came 41 years after Hardy won the Queanbeyan Cup with Blue Ricci. Both horses had the same connections.

"Unfortunately the memory I've got of that day is I lost my binoculars. I left them on top of the car when I drove out of the carpark," part-owner Richard Thackeray said.

"I remember the course but I don't remember a lot of the infrastructure.

"[Chris] and I have been racing together since the mid-70s, his father trained for my father.

"I bred him [Zakeriz] cheaply. He had two or four starts as a three-year-old and he bowed a tendon, so he was in the paddock for 18 months.

"Then he was sore again after that for a while. He had a long, slow build-up. He didn't win his maiden until he was a five-year-old.

"You never give up. You do what the experts tell you to do. We gave him stable rest for a while, then he was just out in the paddock with another horse at home.

"The best is still in front of him."

Forecast rain largely stayed away for Queanbeyan's biggest meeting in a decade.

Local mare Look Only won the Thunderbolt Handicap, while Wollongong galloper Deepfield Magic won the Gold Nugget for team Price, a day after Count De Rupee claimed The Gong.

"We're still coming down from yesterday which was sensational. It was an emotional day and we enjoyed it and it's something we'll never forget," Rob Price told Sky Thoroughbred Central.

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