donk on Spirit’s Austin Major odds: “We’ve been too stressed for three months… we have to chill out”

Team Spirit come into the BLAST.tv Austin Major 2025 as relative outsiders. After a mixed 2025 so far, the reigning Major winners will need to up their game if they’re to be crowned back-to-back champions in Austin. They won’t enter until Stage 3, a result of their extremely high VRS placement.

Team Spirit’s key man is donk, the prodigy rifler who continues to take his game to new heights. Pre-tournament, the youngster spoke to BLAST about Spirit’s season so far, as well as how the team can come out on top in the Austin Major. Oh, and there was also the small matter of bootcamps…

On the year Spirit have had so far:

“Fine, but we could do better, much better. But, we still have six or seven months, so it’s fine, we have time to step up and make the year much better… I think we won two trophies that we had to win, I couldn’t even imagine if I lost in PGL or in BLAST Bounty. I was really confident that we could win more, at least BLAST Lisbon because I felt like we were in a good shape and could’ve won there, and maybe some others I felt like we had good chances, too. But, unfortunately, we didn’t do that.”

Spirit’s donk also spoke on how the competition is shaping up ahead of the Major, including how Spirit match up at the moment:

“I think all of the teams in the world will agree with me that Vitality are a step ahead of everyone, there is no doubt about that… We’ve only faced Falcons once, and MOUZ we’ve played many times, and every game with MOUZ has been close, we’ve had three or four match points in many of them, but we let them come back and beat us. But still, I can’t say that they’re better than us. As for Falcons, we have to face them more times to understand it. This time, we lost through our game, we were 12-10 on Dust2, we had to finish it and we f***ed up a little bit. They were better.”

donk also had plenty to say about chopper, confirming that Spirit choose not to bootcamp, even coming into the Major despite community confusion:

“First, I think that it isn’t the business of the community at all. Experts and talking heads can say everything they want, but we don’t give a sh*t about them. It’s individual for every team. Some teams are better to bootcamp because they will focus better, but for us, we practice much better online from our homes compared to what we would in bootcamps. When you have all those people in one room it can be loud and your energy just goes down really quickly. During practice online, this isn’t an issue, you play more praccs, you’re doing more team stuff. How can we see a problem with this when we won a Major without a bootcamp? It’s the same for all of our trophies. It never was a problem and it’s still not one.”

On how Spirit can repeat their winning run at the PW Shanghai Major 2025:

“The key for us is to get stress out of ourselves, we’ve been too stressed for three months. We have to chill out. If we take a rest and chill, feel fresh, freshen up our game, that will get us back on top.”

You can find the full interview over on the BLAST website, with donk touching on a few more topics with the tournament organizer.