Following a report from EsportFire claiming ESIC was forced to drop their 2 year ban on Nicolai ‘HUNDEN’ Petersen, ESIC has released a statement saying otherwise: “The statements are untrue, denied and the matter has been referred to our lawyers/attorneys. Accordingly, it is not appropriate for ESIC to make a further comment at this time.” EsportFire reports that Petersen pressed charges against ESIC to counter his ban and won. Their source claims that based on an inability to uphold the burden of proof that HUNDEN broke ESIC’s rules, ESIC had no right to issue the ban. According to ESIC’s statement, this is false.
Petersen previously stated in an interview with Danish broadcasting company TV2 that ESIC threatened him with a five year ban if he appealed his current ban, remarking, “I’m deeply saddened that [ESIC] chose not to hear me out in this case since I believe it’s a huge case…The only thing ESIC has done is to threaten me by saying that if I choose to appeal the verdict, I will be given a five-year ban instead.” ESIC never addressed this allegation.
Petersen received his current ban of two years after ESIC were made aware of evidence of him giving a confidential Heroic Google Doc to a competitor, rumored to be Astralis, a team that was courting him to sign on as their new coach. HUNDEN was removed from the Heroic coaching staff when the organization discovered this ahead of IEM Cologne 2021 and was subsequently banned by ESIC until August 24, 2023. HUNDEN then tried to shift the public focus away from his mistakes by placing his former Heroic teammates in the limelight by claiming they were aware of his coaching bug abuse in 2020, a scandal that caused ESIC to give Petersen a year long ban, later reduced to eight months after cooperation. With no solid evidence to back up his claims, ESIC dismissed any complicity from four of the five Heroic players, and gave Nikolaj ‘niko’ Kristensen a heavily reduced sentence for extenuating circumstances that included having Asperger’s.
