Team Vitality set to part ways with Fairy Peak!
Due to their declining form since winning the RLCS X European Championship and a series of disappointing results in the Winter Split, Team Vitality are set to part ways with Victor "Fairy Peak!" Locquet, bringing an end to his four year stint with the French organization. Alexandre "Kaydop" Courant and Yanis "Alpha54" Champenois will search for a replacement over the coming weeks.
During his 1,477 days with Team Vitality, Fairy Peak has won several major honours with the organization. The most significant coming in RLCS Season 7, where he won the European Regional Championship alongside his long-time teammate Kaydop and Kyle "Scrub Killa" Robertson, and went on to achieve victory at the World Championship, beating G2 Esports in the final. This success was followed by a 2nd place finish at the RLCS Season 8 World Championship where the team lost out to an NRG Esports squad featuring Pierre "Turbopolsa" Silfver, whose venture across the Atlantic proved pivotal in bringing down the French giant. While this remains the most successful period in Team Vitality’s history, the team continued to be a major power player in Europe consistently competing for the highest honours in Rocket League Esports.
Under Fairy Peak’s watch, the team transitioned to an all-French lineup by bringing in Alpha54 as a replacement for Scrub Killa in January 2020, and went onto achieve a 2nd place finish at the RLCS Season 9 Regional Championship. In RLCS Season X, the team played second fiddle to an era of dominance fashioned by their rivals Team BDS. Yet, the team remained a persistent threat to Team BDS during this time, and managed two runner-up placements in the Fall and Winter Majors before finally upsetting the titans in the closing tournament of the season, the European Championship.
Despite this success in the summer of 2021, RLCS 2021-22 has been a challenge for the French line-up. Qualification for the Fall Split Major was no easy feat, with the team almost destroying their hopes of doing so with a 15th-16th placement in the first Fall Regional. While they recovered their form and managed to make the major, Team Vitality could not find their footing at the tournament and were subsequently knocked out in the swiss stage of the competition. The Winter Split has proven to be even more fruitless for the organization, with the roster bowing out of two regionals with a 0/3 record in the group stage and as a result, the team failed to qualify for the Winter Major in Los Angeles.
What’s next for Team Vitality?
Ultimately, esports is a results-based business. Team Vitality have struggled to find any success of note in the past six months, so change was inevitable. As one of the largest organizations in France and one of the earliest to join Rocket League Esports, Team Vitality will have a lot of pulling power when it comes to finding a replacement for the departing Fairy Peak. What they lose in both seniority and veterancy, they can gain in star power from the exhaustive pool of French talent competing at the top of European Rocket League. As one of the greatest European players of all time, it remains to be seen where Fairy Peak will be playing in the Spring Split, but there is no doubt that many organizations will be looking for his signature in the weeks to come.
