China’s super-team, Elephant is no more. Four of its players have been freed of any contractual ties with the organization while Super will return to Royal Never Give Up.
Elephant was formed towards the end of 2020 with a lot of drama surrounding their entrance into the Dota 2 scene. The roster formed as a result of the players' unwavering wish to compete together, which got some of them into a lot of contractual troubles and a long and draining transaction discussion with their former organizations.
Once the dust settled and Elephant was ready to compete, the team failed to meet the expectations. China’s super team didn’t qualify to any of the Major tournaments despite doing fairly well locally, in the tournaments outside of the Dota Pro Circuit. They clinched their ticket to TI10 via regional qualifiers, but the much needed redemption story did not happen.
Elephant barely made it out of the group stage, placing second to last in their group and then Evil Geniuses knocked them out of the competition in the first round of the lower bracket in the TI10 playoffs.
In the aftermath of a lackluster year, which concluded with an underwhelming 13th/16th finish at TI10, Elephant decided to shut down the Dota 2 team and leave the scene for now.
In an official post made on their Weibo page, Elephant announced that while for Zhang "Eurus" Chengjun and coach Bai "rOtK" Fan the contract have naturally come to an end, the organization has also decided to terminate the contracts with Lu "Somnus" Yao, Zhou "Yang" Haiyang and Xu "fy" Linsen, who are now free agents and can look for other opportunities without having to deal with another transfer burden. At the same time, Xie "Super" Junhao, who joined the team ahead of the TI10 regional qualifiers on loan from Royal Never Give Up, will return to his organization.
In the past year, we did our best to and provided as much financial support as possible, but as a team that basically relies on the love of its fans, the gap between ideals and reality led the company to finally decide to disband the team.
Sorry to disappoint everyone. – Elephant
Additionally, Elephant confirmed that a month after TI10 concluded, a few of its players are still stranded in Bucharest, Romania due to COVID travel restrictions and that despite terminating the players’ contracts now, the organization is still working on assisting everyone to make it back home safely.
Elephant former roster:
Chengjun “Paparazi灬” Zhang
Yao “Somnus丶M” Lu
Haiyang “Yang” Zhou
Xu “fy” Linsen
Junhao “Super!” Xie
coach: Fan “rOtk” Bai
