She won't mind us saying that the softest part of the Gai Waterhouse make-up is the teeth.
It's had to be because she, almost literally single-handed, led the fight to become a licensed trainer when her late father, the legendary Tommy Smith, became ill in 1994.
Then she had to battle on when bookmaking husband Robbie Waterhouse was warned off racetracks for alleged prior knowledge of the Fine Cotton ring-in.
She doesn't mind a scrap. Like when her longtime mate, dynamo advertising whiz John Singleton, sacked her on television, accusing her son Tom Waterhouse of passing on knowledge that Singleton's horse More Joyous would not win the All Aged Stakes, which it didn't.
Then having to sack her stable jockey Nash Rawiller from Fiorente in the Melbourne Cup in favour of Damien Oliver.
That was said to be because Waterhouse and an element of the large syndicate that races Fiorente wanted a jockey who intimately knew Melbourne tracks, the irony being that Rawiller was a Melbourne jockey before moving to Sydney to became Waterhouse's stable rider. It was probably more to do with Rawiller's luckless ride on Fiorente when fourth in the lead-up Turnbull Stakes. No excuses are allowed in these big races.
A decade earlier Waterhouse didn't like the way her man of this moment, Damien Oliver, rode Grand Amee in a Cox Plate and he didn't ride for her again for years.
At the press conference Waterhouse was asked whether in light of the recent incredible Melbourne Cup success of European horses she would be heading to England to look for her 2014 Cup horse.
"I might already have him," she said, almost certainly referring to Tres Blue, who looked as though this year's Cup was a year too soon.
The European influence in Melbourne Cups is suddenly profound and that's not about to change.
What is changing is the price being asked for the type of young European horses suitable for a Melbourne Cup.
It has got to the point where syndication is pretty much the only viable option. The recent price tag on Mike Moroney's Cup runner Voleuse De Coeurs is believed to be around A$1.7 million ($1.93 million), enormous even if a decent whack of that is in residual breeding potential.
No one knows how many owners are actually in Fiorente, there having been 10 original shares, almost all of which have been divided into separate syndicates.
As someone said after Tuesday's massive victory: "In syndication you can have 2 per cent of the cost and 100 per cent of the fun."
That was certainly true of the remarkable birdcage scene minutes after Fiorente's win where a cast of thousands each gave the impression they owned the horse outright.
Very few of them seemed to know how much of the horse they owned and at that moment they didn't care.
Rawiller was devastated about being dragged off the Melbourne Cup winner.
It's something he'd desperately wanted.
But he felt a tad better after winning Thursday's A$1 million VRC Oaks on Kirramosa for Sydney-based New Zealand trainer John Sargent.
He got it right on Thursday when he said: "In this game, regardless of what happens, you've got to keep your head down and your arse up."
It's something Gai Waterhouse knows a lot about.
