Even so, a man who has never courted publicity found the fall-out almost too much to bear. 

“There were journalists trying to get over the wall. It was crazy. As tough as it was for me, my parents are normal people and they have never experienced anything like this in their lives. For the whole family and the village here in Summerhill, it was awful.” 

‘I just thought I was a normal person, working with horses, going racing, doing my best’

Just how badly was he affected?  “It’s not something I have really spoken about because I don’t want to get too deep or morbid, but it did rattle me. I went from being someone who was self-made with a yard of horses and owners to maybe losing it all in hours.

“It was rough when I saw the [10] horses leaving on the Tuesday, the lads and lasses bawling and crying. They adored those horses and minded them like kids. I understood why they went. I didn’t fall out with their owners and the door is always open. But I needed to grab hold of myself and not let it all slip away as much for everyone in the yard as myself, and for the owners who stayed with us.”

With Denise Foster installed as essentially a caretaker manager for the duration of his six-month suspension, he watched last year’s Cheltenham Festival on television.

“I watched every day, every race,” he says. “I think when Black Tears crossed the line [in the Mares’ Hurdle] I had tears in my eyes. I was so pleased for Denise, who was almost like a mother to the staff. When Tiger Roll won [the Cross-Country Chase] I cried. The dogs and the cats knew I trained the horses until a few days before, but you kinda felt you had the plague watching on television.

“The whole thing probably gave me a bit of time to stand back and look at the lifestyle you are living and the people you don’t appreciate enough. You get in a bit of a bubble and it made me reassess a bit. I never realised how in the limelight I was until this happened. I just thought I was a normal person, working with horses, going racing, doing my best.”

The racing public certainly seem to have accepted that he has served his punishment and it is time to move on. In a fortnight’s time if Elliott, who sends his largest ever team of over 50 horses to this year’s Festival, is not on the ferry back to Ireland as leading trainer, there is a strong chance he will, at least, have the trophies of both that day’s JCB Triumph Hurdle (Pied Piper or Fil Dor) and Boodles Gold Cup (Galvin) under his arm. The likely retirement of Tiger Roll on the Wednesday might also prove emotional. But in a results-driven business, the ban does not appear to have damaged him.

“The reaction when I first went back on the racecourse was something I thought about a lot,” he reflects. “A few close friends came the first day. It was Sligo the next day. We had a winner and they clapped me back into the parade ring. That was something and there was nearly a tear in my eye. I went to Cheltenham in October and everyone was brilliant and I haven’t had a day’s hassle off anyone since.”

In many ways, this is not a surprise: racing is a forgiving sport, and Elliott is its greatest rags-to-riches story since Martin Pipe, his mentor, except he deals in a better class of horse. The son of a panel beater from Summerhill in rural Co Meath, where he is a local hero and sponsors the local football team, he left school at 15 with no contacts or background in the sport other than the desire to be a jockey.

By his mid-twenties, he realised he was not good enough so the next stage was training. Starting out with half-a-dozen horses and a burning ambition, he saddled Silver Birch, a cast-off from no less a trainer than British serial champion Paul Nicholls, to win the 2007 Grand National before he had even sent out a winner at home in Ireland.

He says he would not know how to switch a computer on, but he now trains more than 200 horses at his own place, Cullentra House, near Longwood, and employs 70 staff. He was savvy enough that when he bought the now 90-acre farm, his first installation was an accountant.

A lot who start out with six horses never get beyond six horses and a National never guaranteed advancement, but Elliott has a sixth sense when it comes to the needs of equine athletes.

Tiger Roll, his horse of a lifetime, has given him two more Nationals and is bidding for a record equalling sixth Festival win the week after next. He already has one Gold Cup in the bag thanks to Don Cossack and, since regaining his licence in September, he has sent out 118 winners in Ireland.

When it comes to training, Elliott is, as one local summed him up in a wonderfully Irish way, “an ordinary man but with nothing ordinary about him.”