0
edits
You can know more about editing the articles in the wiki by reading guidelines.
Changes
From Speedrunwiki.com
Jump to navigationJump to search→2008: Reaching new standards
== 2008: Reaching new standards ==
== 2008: Reaching new standards ==
Guillaume has often been thinking that 2008 could have been his best SMK year ever but turned to be his worst on a lot of points. However, it began very well, Guillaume showing a bit stronger than rival Angelo in the beginning of the year, getting his first Player of the Week award after reaching his first Myth time ever on RR 5-laps, breaking the extremely tough 1'27" barrier with a 1'26"98 time. Then, in the end of March, he won the Player of the Quarter award, and many people started to think he could go for the highly acclaimed and sought-after Player of the Year award. According to him, Guillaume's biggest mistake here has been to think this "POY" should be his, and from that date, Angelo started to push harder and harder, passing Guillaume with bigger weekly cuts, and entering PAL top 10 many weeks before him.
Guillaume's major success in 2008 was the organization of the first SMK European Championship in Thil, close to Reims where he was living for one year. Almost 40 people from UK, Netherlands, Belgium and other countries gathered for which, at this time, was probably the biggest SMK international meeting ever. Despite of all the work he had to do as the championship host, Guillaume fought hard and ranked #8 on 39, with two quarterfinals (Time Trial and GP, defeating former GP World Champion [[Sébastien Holmière]]) and a twist of huge frustration after being defeated by the Battle World Champion [[Drew Blumfield]] in a one-way Match Race opposition, then at the same step in Battle, with a much better performance (Drew won "only" 5-2 after Guillaume resisted much more than expected with some awesome 3-3 opportunities at some moments).
Guillaume certainly lost all opportunity to win POY 2008 in the last quarter: reaching top 10 too late while Angelo had already climbed to #7, he stopped after having passed German rival [[Manuel Babjar]] for #9 and switched to NTSC, hoping to catch the attention with massive cuts as he was starting from a very weak overall level there. In December, Guillaume won two consecutive POW awards and his first Player of the Month, breaking his first official NBT World Record on RR for the last update of the year (1'24"07), but it was too late and Angelo became obviously Player of the Year 2008.
There are two interesting anecdotes about this reward. First of all, [[Sami Çetin]], the Players' Site manager, told Guillaume that he was the obvious second choice after Angelo — a kind of private information Sami generally keeps for himself. Then, Angelo also asked Sami a few times to divide this prize to share it with Guillaume in the awards charts, which was very kind and generous from him, but Sami replied that it was impossible for technical reasons. We also can easily guess it wouldn't have really made sense, even if that year, there were almost two players of the years in terms of spirit.
== 2009: The consecration ==
== 2009: The consecration ==
