Grit. That’s what nineteenth-century Thoroughbred racing was about. Back then the sport in America wasn’t so much about a horse’s speed—although speed was important—as it was about stamina. A racehorse was no good unless it could run a distance of four miles or greater. The term used to describe a gifted racehorse was bottom. Bottom was what carried a horse beyond the brink, past the exceptional, and into the extraordinary. It was the embodiment of an undefined quality buried somewhere in a horse’s soul. Bottom was a measure: how much courage, stamina, heart, and strength a horse had before it hit that realm where it could go no further.
To say that a horse had bottom meant, essentially, that it had no bottom. It had staying power. Stamina and courage played into every aspect of nineteenth-century competition.
