After two years of postponement due to Covid, the Trackmania Cup, a huge esports show, finally took hold of Bercy on Saturday. “It’s an apotheosis“, confides to AFP the streamer Adrien “Zerator» Nougaret, at the same time creator, organizer and commentator of the competition. Nearly 15,000 spectators gave voice in the Parisian enclosure where the double defending champion, Gwendal “GwenDuparc, 17, from the Gameward team, once again won the title in this car racing game. This time, the one who was still taking the baccalaureate exams two days earlier won in duet with Sébastien “Display”Team BDS panic after more than 5 hours of show.
Dressed in overalls like real Formula 1 drivers, they got out of their single-seaters placed on the stage in the middle of Bercy to lift the trophy in front of 180,000 other people who followed the competition online on the Twitch platform. “We are very hot, we are hungry“, declared to AFP Affi after more than 5h30 of show. “But it was so worth it to live an experience like that, it will be unforgettable what we lived.“Despite this success, “it is very unlikely that we will redo a Bercy right away“Acknowledges Zerator. “It was a lot of work, a lot of sacrifices, time, money so it’s not easy to do every day!»
Unavoidable
In ten editions, the Trackmania Cup has become an unmissable event in esports, a sector which has itself experienced tremendous expansion in recent years. To the point that on Friday, 150 of its main figures were received at the Elysée by Emmanuel Macron. Here “in relaxationBetween two rehearsals, Zerator explained to the President of the Republic the genesis of the tournament. “It’s an event that I created, I’m not going to say in underwear at home, in socks, but it’s a bit like that“, he said.
For the 32-year-old streamer, the Trackmania Cup adventure began in 2013. “There were already Trackmania competitions, but I thought it was too soft“, he explains. “I thought the races were too stuffy, too precise, a little too professional. They looked like F1 circuits and that’s a shame in a video game where you can do loops and jump in the air.“He then designs circuits”a bit crazy», with challenges, pitfalls and obstacles. First exclusively online, the competition met with immediate success. “The players were hooked, but those who were the most hooked were the spectators who found it very funny that I was shaking up the professional Trackmania scene a little bit.he says.
In 2016, he then decided to produce the final stages of the tournament in public, in the large cinema hall of the Grand Rex in Paris. “We put the ticket office online and there in 20 minutes, ticket offices sold out. Unbelievable. And after, each year, we took bigger and bigger rooms and the success was there each time. It’s cool. The Trackmania Cup is not just a competition. It’s also entertainment and that’s why it’s successful.»
A postponement, problems
Lyon in 2017, Toulouse in 2018, the Zenith of Strasbourg in 2019… The 2020 and 2021 editions were already to take place at the AccorArena but the pandemic decided otherwise. “The postponement created all kinds of problems. Already, there is the ticketing side, because we had sold the 15,000 places. Then there is the whole scenography side. Two years later, are we maintaining what we planned? Are the service providers still available? There are 1,000 questions that arise. So that put us in a little complicated situations, but we managed to raise our heads.»