Team Spirit’s second TI triumph is even more impressive than OG’s

It may have taken a decade to find a repeat TI winner, but the core of Team Spirit sticking together and bouncing back after a disappointment, defeating the final boss of the final DPC season, is even more impressive than what OG managed to accomplish.

You can certainly draw parallels between the epic runs of OG and Team Spirit across the years they orbited around the Aegis of Champions. They both claimed their first title with a Cinderella run, then followed it up with a super-dominant showing despite a lackluster set of results in the DPC.

Except for the fact that Spirit did it with a year-long gap and a roster readjustment on both sides of an earth-shattering realignment that was the pandemic, winning a very different TI at the second time.

Not to mention the incredible opposition they faced in the form of Gaimin Gladiators, a team that seemed – no, a team that was – unstoppable throughout the year, winning a whopping five elite-level Dota 2 tournaments before making it all the way to TI’s grand finals.

They didn’t just beat them – they crushed them, with shades of OG’s win over Team Liquid at TI9.

The stats speak for themselves: Just two games dropped throughout the event, an astonishing 90.5% win rate courtesy of a 19-2 overall record that now officially top the charts. Step aside, TI1 NAVI and TI3 Alliance: neither 90 nor 88.5% will cut it here.

And, of course, Yatoro’s reverse Samson storyline will serve as a source of memes for many years to come.

And how about that statistics-shattering comeback in game three to make it all seem easy and trivial, as long as you have a Tusk like Mira on your side?

It’s not like Team Spirit’s dominance was the sort of one-off that we’ve seen from OG, either. Yatoro’s no ana: wins at Riyadh Masters and DreamLeague Season 21 confirm that there’s more to this than just the incredible resilience and the past experience required to make a deep TI run.

It’s just a shame that Larl hasn’t been made a millionaire overnight like his teammates were in 2021. Then again, he can probably find solace in the megabucks from Riyadh, oil-stained and sportswash-smelling as they may be.

The curse, of course, also continues – or concludes, depending on your perspective. No DPC Major winner has gone on to win The International, a galling condemnation of the Pro Circuit formula that is mercifully coming to an end with this calendar year.

With this, another chapter in Dota 2 esports’ prestigious history has come to a close. Despite the fraction of past prize pools, this return to Seattle was a resounding success, be it production quality, event format, or non-EU viewership. (That said, please, think more of EU viewership when TI 2024 rolls around.) Whatever comes after the DPC, we can’t know for sure just yet, but I, for one, am optimistic about what is to come. With teams and players like Team Spirit and GG’s squad, it is guaranteed to be a treat.

Photo credit: Valve / Flickr