Checking the Leaked Deterministic PP Against the Horse’s Own Record — and Finding a Problem or a Deep Fake
Throughout this story, Past The Wire has tried to hold every piece of evidence to the same standard: verify before you publish, and say plainly what you know versus what you don’t. That standard just produced a finding that needs to be reported on its own, because it does not reflect well on the leaked Deterministic past performance document at the center of this entire saga.
Credit belongs first to Craig Brogden, a respected Kentucky-based breeder and owner whose stock includes Breeders’ Cup and Eclipse Champion Tepin among others, for raising the question directly. Brogden reached out and flagged something specific: the dates and locations listed for Deterministic’s two Shockwave treatments in the leaked PP did not match what he understood to be the horse’s actual location and training pattern during that window. He put it bluntly. Past The Wire’s response was the only responsible one available, don’t take anyone’s word for it, including his, and check it against an independent source.
That is exactly what we did. Here is what the record actually shows.
What the Leaked Document Claims
The leaked Deterministic past performances list two veterinary entries:
07Feb26-Vet, Shockwave, Off Date 3/9/26, location listed as Saratoga.
15Feb26-Vet, Shockwave, Off Date 3/17/26, location listed as Payson Park Training Center.
On their face, paired with the standard 30-day post-Shockwave stand-down period, those entries are internally consistent, the arithmetic checks out cleanly, which is part of why this publication did not initially flag them as suspicious. But internal consistency is not the same as accuracy, and Brogden’s objection was about something the math alone could not catch: whether the horse was actually where the document said he was.
What the Horse’s Official Work Tab Actually Shows
Deterministic’s complete published workout history tells a different story, and it is independently verifiable by anyone with access to a standard past performance work tab.
On February 7, 2026 the exact date the leaked document lists Deterministic as receiving Shockwave therapy at Saratoga the horse’s official work tab shows a timed workout at Payson Park: three furlongs in 38.4 seconds, breezing, ranked 7th of 8 published works that day at that distance.
On March 1, 2026 a date that falls squarely inside the leaked document’s own stated recovery window, during which it claims the horse was off and ineligible following the February 15th treatment, with an off-date of March 17 the horse’s official work tab shows another timed workout at Payson Park: five furlongs in 1:03.75, breezing, ranked 1st of 2.
Both of those are real, published, attributed workouts. They are not ambiguous and they are not difficult to locate. And they directly contradict the leaked document on two separate points. A horse cannot be breezing at a training center in Florida and simultaneously undergoing a veterinary procedure at a racetrack in upstate New York on the same calendar day. And a horse cannot have an official, recorded timed work during a window the document itself says he was sidelined and ineligible to do exactly that.
What This Means
This is not a matter of interpretation or a close call. These are two specific, checkable factual claims in the leaked PP, and both fail against the horse’s own independently verifiable record. That is a real and significant problem with the document, and it needs to be said plainly: whatever else is true about how this material was built or where the underlying data originated, at least these two specific entries do not hold up.
I want to be precise about what this does and does not establish, because precision has mattered at every stage of this story and it matters here most of all. This does not mean the entire document is fabricated from nothing. It does not mean the veterinary data embedded in it has no basis in fact. The broader investigative framework this publication has pursued, that this is a custom-built product assembled from multiple data sources, with veterinary information imported as a field into a pre-existing PP skeleton remains the most coherent explanation for everything we have seen, including this. An assembled product pulling data from different systems and merging it into one document creates exactly the kind of opportunity for fields to be mismatched, mislabeled, or attached to the wrong location. That would not make the underlying treatment dates fictitious. It would mean whoever built this document made an error, attached a location field incorrectly, or a possibility that cannot be dismissed, included information that was wrong from the start.
What it does establish, conclusively, is that this document cannot be taken at face value in its entirety. Two specific data points within it are demonstrably inconsistent with the horse’s own official, public record. Anyone treating this leaked PP as a clean, reliable source of fact, including, frankly, this publication in earlier pieces, which examined the internal date math but did not cross-check the locations against the horse’s actual movements needs to revise that assumption.
Worth Noting: Neither Public Statement Addressed This
Both Lisa Lazarus, in TDN’s Ask HISA column, and The Jockey Club, in its public statement on InCompass and Track Manager, addressed this leaked document directly. Lazarus stated the screenshots could not have come from the HISA Portal due to specific data discrepancies. The Jockey Club stated that a portion of the included veterinarian’s information was not available via the Track Manager system and that it was unclear whether Track Manager was used to access the information in this case.
Neither statement mentioned the specific inconsistency this publication has now confirmed, that the horse’s documented location on at least two of the dates in question does not match what the leaked PP claims. That is worth noting plainly, without speculating as to why. It may be outside the scope of what either institution was reviewing, given that both statements focused narrowly on whether their own systems were the source of the data rather than on verifying the document’s content against the horse’s actual training record. It may be something neither organization has yet checked. Past The Wire does not know which. What can be said is that the discrepancy was identifiable using nothing more than a publicly available work tab, and it was not surfaced in either institution’s public response.
Where This Leaves the Investigation
If anything, this finding strengthens rather than undermines the core thesis Past The Wire has been building across this series: that this is not a clean regulatory export, but a constructed document, and constructed documents are vulnerable to exactly this kind of error. It also raises the stakes on every question already sitting in front of The Jockey Club, InCompass, and anyone else who may eventually be identified as having built or distributed this material. If the document contains demonstrable inaccuracies, that is relevant not just to the question of where it came from, but to how much weight anyone, bettors, trainers, regulators, should have placed on it in the first place.
Past The Wire will be incorporating this finding into our ongoing formal inquiries and will continue checking every piece of this story against independent, verifiable sources before reporting it as fact. That standard caught this discrepancy. It will continue to be applied to everything that follows.
Our thanks to Craig Brogden for pushing on this directly and specifically rather than leaving it as a vague objection. That is how stories like this get checked properly, and it is how they should be checked.
Last but not least, this finding forces a question that has been sitting quietly underneath every other theory in this story: what if the source of the leak isn’t a regulatory breach at all, but something far less sophisticated and far more cynical. A skilled enough hand, with access to genuine PP formatting, real figures, and a working knowledge of how vet-list entries are typically notated, doesn’t need InCompass or EquiTAPS to produce something that looks convincingly real. They need a template, some imagination, and the time to enjoy watching an entire industry tear itself apart over it. A total fabrication built for nothing more than the warped satisfaction of watching trainers, executives, and bettors alike chase a ghost, cannot be ruled out at this stage, and frankly deserves the same scrutiny as every other theory this publication has chased. If that turns out to be the answer, it would be its own kind of scandal: not a data breach at all, but a referendum on how quickly an entire sport will believe the worst about itself when handed a convincing enough piece of paper.
Related Coverage: Upon Further Review, The Jockey Club Spoke, The Angle
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