James McDonald is back in the zone. Part of that chest beating he gave himself as he, standing bolt upright in the saddle, and Astern flashed over the line to win Saturday's A$1 million Golden Rose at Rosehill had many elements.
Yes, one was for winning Australia's first million-dollar race for the season. Another, doing it for his boss Sheikh Mohammed. Yet another - and perhaps the most important - was that it was for himself.
Here we had a tiny kid off a Cambridge farm, who, from day one just a decade back when showing us he was the new, you beaut good thing, looked impervious to the monumental pressures of racing at the sharp end.
What has probably not been properly acknowledged is the enormity of McDonald, at such a young age, landing one of the most precious riding contracts on the planet - Sheikh Mohammed's No 1 Southern Hemisphere jockey.
However, with that comes monumental responsibility and pressure. Even if the Sheikh has a few thousand oil wells back in Dubai and horse racing is his abiding passion, you cannot put together a 500-horse operation worldwide without expectations of winning the big ones. He has already spent a fortune trying to win a Melbourne Cup, a couple of seconds the best so far.