Attending VALORANT Champions is a once in a lifetime experience for any professional player, but what can make that experience even more special is when a player celebrates their birthday during the event. For Team Vikings’ Gustavo “Sacy” Rossi, he said it was the best birthday present anyone could have given him. As for Cloud9’s Anthony “vanity” Malaspina, celebrating his birthday was just another day, but that the cake he had was great.
After a close match against Gambit Esports in the upper bracket of Group C, Sacy took to a post-game press conference to talk about having a birthday at the tournament. On Dec. 2 Sacy celebrated turning 24 from the comfort of his hotel room with his teammates. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, players were confined to their hotel rooms for a majority of the tournament due to a rise in cases at Champions. However, Sacy made the best of it, saying just attending the event was a dream of his.
“To be honest, I’m living the dream,” Sacy said. “As I said in an interview with Riot, I came from League of Legends so this is my Worlds. I’m living the dream, this is my first “Worlds” and it’s my birthday so I’m not even sad that I lost to Gambit. I’m like ‘Oh! We almost won against Gambit!’ and we have a chance.”
Vanity raves about European birthday cake
While Sacy has been on “cloud nine” since coming to Champions, regardless of the situation with COVID-19, vanity had a less enthusiastic opinion about celebrating his birthday at the event. He explained he wasn’t that big of a fan of his birthday to begin with, so celebrating it during Champions wasn’t as big as it was for Sacy. Vanity celebrated his birthday just two days after Sacy, on Dec. 4.
“I’ve never really celebrated my birthday, so it’s really nothing different,” vanity said. “Cloud9 got me a cake, so that was pretty cool, but I’ve never really been a big birthday person. I don’t really like cake that much, but this cake wasn’t like American cake where it was loaded with sugar, so it was pretty good.”
Team Vikings and Cloud9 have both been through up and downs at VALORANT Champions with losses to some of the best teams in the world. Despite COVID-19 impacting the tournament, both players were still able to make the best of their birthdays during the event.
