Yatoro and Mira take a competitive break, Team Spirit down to 3 players

headline photo credits: Valve

The post-TI13 shuffle hits the fans hard as the two-time TI champions of Team Spirit Yatoro/Raddan and Mira take a competitive break.

According to the official announcement made by Team Spirit on Wednesday, September, 18, both Illya "Yatoro" Mulyarchuk and Myroslav "Mira" Kolpakov become inactive and will take a break from their professional careers at the players’ request.

“You didn’t just become some of the best – you have set an example for hundreds of thousands of players and fans around the world,” posted Team Spirit on their social media accounts. “It was a real honor to walk this path with you. We eagerly await your return, whenever and wherever it may happen,” the organization added.

Yatoro is one of the founding members of the two-time TI winning roster of Team Spirit. He joined the team along with captain Yaroslav "Miposhka" Naidenov and offlane player Magomed "Collapse" Khalilov at the end of 2020 when Spirit brought them in from Yellow Submarine. Less than a year later, the four of them would become TI champions, winning The International 2021, which happened to be the edition with the largest prize pool in the history of TIs, 40M dollars.

At TI10, in 2021 Yatoro set a new record with his 5 rampages on The International main stage, and to the present day, nobody got to dethrone him. Two years later, when The International returned to Seattle in the renovated Key Arena and renamed to Climate Pledge Arena, Team Spirit lifted the Aegis of Champions once more, making all the players' dreams come true; to claim the Aegis in the most iconic venue of The International.

At the end of four years with Team Spirit, Mira and Yatoro, who ahead of this year’s TI, changed his nickname to Raddan, head into an indefinite competitive break with their names engraved on the Aegis of Champions twice, a Riyadh Mastery trophy, a Major trophy and multiple grand finals appearances and a handful of other third party championship titles.

In the meantime, Team Spirit are among the directly invited teams for the upcoming two LAN tournaments, PGL Wallachia Season 2 and BetBoom Dacha Belgrade 2024, which means that the fans won’t have to wait for too long before seeing the new Team Spirit roster.