Ray Boyd means it very much as a compliment when he says his daughter Alana pole vaults like a man.
It's one of the advantages the two-time Commonwealth champion has in an athletic discipline where the standard has improved rapidly in the past two decades.
But having the killer instinct in an event populated by extroverts has often not come as naturally to the 31-year-old Queenslander, who plans to retire from the sport and get married after the Rio Olympics.
"You have got to be a bit blokey in girls' pole vault," said Ray Boyd ahead of Wednesday night's final at the world titles in Beijing.
"They are not born with the levels of testosterone of the boys - they have to find it.
"They have to be a mongrel, because pole vault is just a mongrel event where you have got to come down and smash the take-off.
"I think technically she is more like a bloke than a girl, she can get her back upside down and get pop off the top of the pole whereas a lot of the girls are just tall and they hold high and almost fall over the bar."
Ray Boyd - who won pole vault gold at the 1982 Commonwealth Games - can sense his daughter is belatedly developing the self-belief needed to excel at the highest level.
She has had two stints with her father as a coach, separated by three and a half years in Perth under Alex Parnov, who also took Steve Hooker to world and Olympic gold.
"It was time for her to get a new coach and Alex is obviously a good coach, he's got the results on the board," said Ray Boyd.
"It was a tough three and a half years because he's a hard task-master.
"He's Russian and he expects a lot. He treats them mean.
"She struggled through all that but he did get her to go over 4.76m and changed her technique and improved her confidence to a level.
"But then it got a point where she just couldn't hack it over there any more so she decided to come home to dad."
Alana Boyd booked her spot in her first world championships final on Monday with a clutch final-attempt clearance at 4.55m - just as she did at the 2012 London Olympics.
"We have been telling her for a long time she belongs but she has not grasped it over the years and yesterday she came of age I thought," said Ray Boyd.
He thinks 2015 world rankings leader Yarisley Silva from Cuba deserves to be the gold-medal favourite in Beijing.
London 2012 Olympic champ Jenn Suhr from the US and Greece's Nikoleta Kyriakopoulou are also well-credentialled, although both looked below their best in the qualifying round.
But if the self-belief is there at the Bird's Nest on Wednesday night, Ray Boyd can also see Alana challenging for what would be Australia's first major medal in the women's vault since Tatiana Grigorieva claimed silver at the Sydney Olympics.
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