Nothing was said but the embrace spoke volumes.
It occurred in the mounting hard just as Chris Waller's composure cracked as he told how on Saturday morning - the morning of the day that had finally come - Winx looked 'picture perfect'.
Hugh Bowman had found Waller and tapped him on the shoulder. Waller turned and embraced the jockey who had shared the journey of this horse and more.
Earlier in the week Waller had revealed the depth of their friendship; they were collaborators, each other's mate and mentor.
Until Saturday, when Humidor threatened for a few strides to trash a script that had been etched in stone, Winx had been unbeatable for three years.
The inevitability of victory had been assumed by everyone bar Waller and Bowman.
This Winx 'thing' had tested both men, pushed them closer together to an understanding only they knew.
They embraced for less than a minute and never lost eye contact. Briefly, they were the only two people on track.
Waller then returned to the media, revealing he lay in bed most nights for three years 'thinking about getting beaten, so I was prepared for it'.
Fifteen minutes earlier the summery crowd had mobbed around the tiered steps that surround the mounting yard. They clapped Winx into that small space and roared her onto the track.
At the 1000m, when Bowman peeled wide on a circuit that was playing lopsided for those hard against the fence, they roared again; and again, to an unimaginable pitch, when Bowman pushed for home.
This was an event rather than a race. That was the script. Kingston Town's greatness is measured by his three Cox Plates. Winx would equal him. In a canter. Her rivals were merely there to keep her company.
The paradox between two greats almost 40 years apart was that Kingston Town was always going to have to scramble for his third. He was under heavy riding from the get-go in 1982. At the 500m, the late Bill Collins declared 'Kingston Town can't win'.
At about the same point on Saturday, as if hard-nosed Cox Plate history deemed it, Winx was not going to canter home to some pre-set choreography.
She almost lurched to the front. The hooded Humidor was circling. She might lose.
As soon as she straightened, Humidor, with his drunken tendencies ironed out by a villain's 'hood', came at her, straight and hard.
Waller was out the back. He knew the celebrations had started before the gates had even opened - then heralded by blue streamers after she clawed it out - but he stood passionless by a monitor near the jockeys' room.
WATCH: Winx's win
His life and career - and Winx's place among the immortals - had come down to the next few seconds. Waller said he'd dreamed of a moment like this, when everything was on the line, as a kid.
The 'mega sports person', as he would later describe Winx, was being chased down.
Blake Shinn had already won four races on a biased track that almost wrecked Winx. He said afterwards that 'I gritted my teeth' as the mare came back to him.
Shinn was in a menacing mood, as was the mercurial Darren Weir.
Weir had won earlier with Gun Case and Lucky Hussler, a once-brilliant horse who hadn't won for two years, yet flogged his rivals in the previous race, the Crystal Mile.
Winx had dismantled Humidor in the Turnbull Stakes; made him run all crooked as she teased away.
Weir is neither a sentimentalist nor a defeatist.
He threw on the blinkers not as an act of desperation but as a weapon that might allow for the greatest upset in memory. He ordered Shinn not to ride Humidor upside down, as Damian Lane had in the Caulfield Cup.
"Someone had to make a race of it," Weir said later. "Ya gotta ride 'em properly. I wouldn't have been that popular if I'd have pulled it off but I wouldn't care. I'd have been f...ing stoked."
These menacing things were swirling in Waller's head as he started at that monitor at the 200-metre mark of the Cox Plate.
"(I was thinking) a lot of things. Will she, won't she, will she, won't she? Where's the post? How's the other horse going? Who is the other horse? I've got Winx, we'll be right. She got there. Simple as that.
"Darren Weir presents his horses very well, as have all the trainers in the race. They came here with a little bit up their sleeve."
Ultimately, the race of champions, the race where you absolutely earn it, proved greater than the sum of its parts.
On the scoreboard and on the tote, Winx would not lose this Cox Plate. Her lacklustre opposition seemed cobbled together.
But it was the Cox Plate. It's not a salad plate.
To join Kingston Town, Winx had to earn it.
Waller has spent three years preparing for the day Winx might succumb to the next horse like Humidor, but he can rest easy on Saturday night.
This was an epic assignment that looked a walk in the park on paper, but was the opposite. They threw things at her that no-one saw coming, and she won.
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