"I can't move my hands": After 92 hours, 264 attempts, and 12 days of grinding, Trackmania player beats 4-hour ice gauntlet after his opponent in the $3,800 race had finally gone to sleep

Trackmania continues to host one of the wildest communities in video games, and nowhere is that more evident than in the race for world-first on Deep Slip. This community-made track is an absolute gauntlet from bottom to top, made up of slippery pathways that can easily send you tumbling back down to the start of a multi-hour attempt, and the 12-day race to be the first to beat it came with some high drama.

While the race's edition of Trackmania launched back in 2020, the game's more recently seen a series of esports pushes – some led by the devs under Ubisoft, and some by the community. One of the biggest is Deep Dip, a fan-made map series with community-driven prize pools. The Deep Dip II race in 2024 was a particular highlight, with a 36-day race awarding a $30,000 prize pool to its top three finishers.

Deep Slip is a spin-off of that series, and while the race only lasted 12 days, garnering a much smaller prize pool of $3,820, It was still properly dramatic. The map is made up of 18 floors, almost entirely built out of ice, and if you miss any of the devious jumps you might go careening all the way back down to the bottom – a particularly harsh punishment when these runs can be hours long.

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In the closing days of the race, it had largely come down to two top competitors: Wirtual and eLconn. Wirtual had led much of the race, but things shifted at the end, with eLconn making better progress on the final challenges. The last obstacle was to be floor 18, an absolutely diabolical collection of challenges that was being built up as an absolutely fiendish final boss which would add days to the race.

I was the FIRST Player to Finish Deep Slip!!! - YouTube

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But then eLconn found a massive skip that bypassed a giant chunk of floor 18, leaving eLconn just a few jumps away from winning the race. Suddenly, the race was super tight between Wirtual and eLconn, as Wirtual explained in a video breaking down the run. The difference came when eLconn went to bed for the night.

"I was prepared to put in a long grind," Wirtual explains. "But would it be enough? That is essentially what was going through my mind. Would it be enough? I knew eLconn as one of the world's best ice players had within himself to beat it first thing the next morning. But while he was on, I could hardly drive a run. I kept looking at the leaderboard and just thinking, 'Man, when is eLconn going to win the map?'"

If you look at the stat tracker of Wirtual's progression during this stretch, "you can really see the despair," he explains. While directly competing with eLconn, he spent roughly five hours just continuously failing the much easier early floors, not even reaching the final challenges. "But then, when I noticed that eLconn was finally off for the day, I was able to relax more. And soon after I started driving the eventual winning run."

That winning run was ultimately nearly four hours long, and if you want a big breakdown of how it all works, I'd recommend checking out Wirtual's (somewhat) truncated 90-minute recap. But if you only watch one thing from the run, make it the clip of the winning pop-off above, where Wirtual breaks down with such physical relieve he briefly exclaims "I can't move my hands." You'll rarely see such a genuine display of emotion in esports, and that's what this kind of competition is all about.

Time to brush up your skills in the best racing games.