LCA superstar Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng has announced his retirement as a professional League of Legends player. The 27-year-old player posted a TwitLonger that acted as his official retirement statement.
With a quick reflection about his beginnings as a shy and clueless 17-year old to his legendary status as a player today, he confirmed that he was “starting a new chapter of his life.”
The ADC will be the second player to retire from TSM this year, following Soren “Bjergsen” Bjerg’s retirement and shift into the head coach role a few months ago.
DL started his career with CLG in 2011, dealing with some hard losses with the trying team. Despite barely winning against Curse Academy in the 2015 NALCS Spring Promotional Series, CLG would go on to claim Doublelift’s first-ever LCS championship in his career.
With a redemptive run with CLG, the NA superstar took his talents to the superteam of TSM in 2016, joining the likes of Bjergsen and Vincent “Biofrost” Wang. With the TSM squad, he went on to win three consecutive splits and cemented his status as an NA legend.
After a failed Worlds run and some heated tension between DL and other players and staff, the veteran ADC joined Team Liquid in 2018 and continued to win another four domestic championships, but his journey to Worlds would always end in the group stage.
With beloved team members leaving and the ADC lacking the motivation to play, Doublelift parted ways with the TL squad and returned to TSM for the 2020 Summer Split.
As a hail-mary Split that brought back TSM’s glory-day line-up with a few young talents in Sergen “Broken Blade’ Celik and Mingyi “Spica” Lu, the reformed squad managed to fight off Spring champs Cloud9 and Spring finalists FlyQuest to claim TSM’s seventh-ever LCS title.
Following TSM’s domestic success, the DL-backed squad underperformed at the 2020 League of Legends World Championship, setting the lowest-ever record (0-6) of any pool-one team at the tournament.
Despite having a bittersweet end to his professional career, Doublelift leaves the League world as one of the most decorated NA players in history. The world-class ADC ends his career as an eight-time LCS champion, five-time LCS All-Star and member of the All-Pro First Team, and a six-time Worlds contender.
While his reign as a professional player has come to an end, Doublelift will live forever as one of the best ADC’s to come out of the NA region. The retired ADC has yet to announce his plans for the future.
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