Outlander is big hope as Gordon Elliott looks to improve his Festival numbers

Gordon Elliott knows for certain there is one Gold Cup winner in his yard as Don Cossack, successful in last season’s race but since retired due to injury, is still stabled at his County Meath base. But there may soon prove to be two, as Elliott will send Outlander and Don Poli to the Cheltenham Festival’s feature event on 17 March and remains optimistic that Outlander in particular could be up to the task of winning it.

There would be an added twist if either of them were to win, as both joined Elliott’s stable in the autumn following the split between Michael O’Leary, their owner, and Willie Mullins, who has saddled six runners-up in the Gold Cup but never the winner.

Don Poli is among the outsiders but Outlander is a live 10-1 chance to follow up his win in the Grade One Lexus Chase at Christmas and remains unexposed at three and a quarter miles.

“If it [Don Cossack’s injury] had happened the week before Cheltenham last year, I’d have been gutted,” Elliott said here on Tuesday, “but he won a Gold Cup and he’s retired as a champion, and I suppose when they come back off an injury as he did, you always think it could be the last day.

“Don Poli has had enough chances to win a Gold Cup but he hasn’t won one, but he’s definitely in good form and his last few runs have been good. Outlander is unexposed, it’s his first time over the trip but the way he’ll be ridden will suit because we’ll drop him in and take our time.

“To be honest, neither of them are Don Cossack; there’s no point saying it. He won a Gold Cup last year and I’m not stupid enough to be thinking that I can have another one like him the following year. But for me there’s not a lot between any of these [Gold Cup] horses.

“He [Outlander] has surprised me to be honest. He’s a horse that doesn’t do anything too fancy at home. The way he ran at Down Royal [in November] he wouldn’t have won a point-to-point but I’d say that a few of those horses that came out of Willie’s, when I ran them at Down Royal, I hadn’t given them enough work.”

Don Cossack started favourite for last year’s Gold Cup while Elliott’s runners this year are both double-figure prices and, though he is leading Mullins in the Irish trainers’ championship, Elliott is not, as yet, a regular winner in the Festival’s Grade One events.

In addition to last year’s Gold Cup he took the Triumph Hurdle in 2014 with Tiger Roll and has saddled four winners in handicaps and two more in the four-mile National Hunt Chase.

He will have an outstanding chance in the Grade One Albert Bartlett Novice Hurdle, however, where his six-year-old Death Duty is certain to start favourite at around 3‑1 while Tombstone, fourth home in last year’s Supreme Novice Hurdle, is expected to be added to the field for the Champion Hurdle.

“Death Duty is a big three-mile chaser in the making,” Elliott said. “He’s done nothing wrong this year. You can’t knock him. He is the sort of horse who doesn’t do anything flashy at home. He is very relaxed and laid-back and they are normally the best ones.

“Tombstone was meant to go chasing this season but he had a setback. I’m not saying he is good enough to win a Champion Hurdle but Petit Mouchoir is the third or fourth favourite and he was behind us in the Supreme last year. He’s not been supplemented yet but he will work on Saturday and, if everything goes right, the plan is to run him.”Elliott’s lead in the Irish title race owes much to a series of wins in major handicaps rather than Grade One events, where Mullins still reigns supreme. His team for Cheltenham will include plenty of runners in the handicap events, and Jury Duty could be one name to remember, as the trainer went to the effort of sending him to the final qualifier for the Pertemps Final at Chepstow three days ago to guarantee a place in the field on 16 March.

“We were running out of time to get him qualified,” Elliott said. “He won well at Navan [earlier in the season] and he’s a horse I’m looking forward to running.”

Empire Of Dirt will attempt to give O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, his first success in the Ryanair Chase, while Mega Fortune, the winner of the Spring Juvenile Hurdle at Leopardstown, is second-favourite for the Triumph Hurdle behind Philip Hobbs’s Defi Du Seuil.

“Mine has won a Grade One and so has Philip’s and the four-year-olds are what they are,” Elliott said. “You wouldn’t think that Mega Fortune was a Flat-bred horse when you watch him at home, he works more like a three-mile chaser. We will ride him positively in the cheekpieces [which he wore for the first time over jumps at Leopardstown], he wore them on the Flat so I’d thought that we would be putting them on him at some stage.”