Among professional players in Valorant, there are many veterans who started their journey at the beginning of the discipline's inception and continue to perform at the highest level in 2024. The organizers of the Valorant Champions Tour decided to honor them all and recently announced a series of posts about these players.

A recent tweet from the official Valorant Champions Tour Twitter account caught attention. It stated that the esports department decided to remember all professional players who started competing on the Valorant esports scene back in 2020 during the inaugural First Strike tournaments. Over the next few weeks, they will regularly honor and tell stories about these players. The first official veteran of the Valorant Champions Tour series is the well-known Latvian-British player Ardis "ardiis" Svarenieks.

It is worth recalling that the First Strike series was the initial set of tournaments for Valorant, organized by Riot Games, which laid the foundation for the future esports ecosystem. The events took place at the end of 2020 in the 7 existing regions at that time: CIS, Korea, Japan, Brazil, Europe, Turkey, North America. Clearly, Ardiis also participated in this series of tournaments. As part of G2 Esports, he successfully passed the qualifiers in the European region, eventually securing a 3rd-4th place finish at First Strike Europe.

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Given his experience, there is no doubt that Ardis deserves the title of a veteran of the Valorant Champions Tour series and should be one of the first to receive this honor. We will continue to follow the official social media of the organizers to find out who else has received this title.