Paintball Magazine Paintball.Media Magazine May 2016 | Page 125

realise he’s French, but we can provisionally suspend
our initial concerns all the time he’s taking our sport in
the right direction, which I think he is doing so, along
with Steve. Back in ‘89, Steve created the Mayhem
annual event which immediately became Europe’s
premiere tournament and the aspiration for all of us
players in Europe back in the early 90s.
During the 90s, Laurent had started to promote his
own brand of annual event that was held in Toulouse
and it soon became one of the best tournaments in
the world with all the panache and style we are used
to with the French. The Yanks lapped it up, and the
event attracted many US teams and players who
crossed the pond just to compete with Europe’s finest
but more poignantly, they wanted to experience a
different type of tournament than they were used to.
If you speak to anyone who’s been to one of those
Toulouse events, they will always mention the event’s
‘atmosphere’. It was like nothing else back then and
set the tone for a different type of event that spawned
the now famous NPPL’s inaugural event in 2003 at
Huntington Beach.

Pete.

It wasn’t long before Steve and Laurent began to
realise their destiny was to take them both toward
an integrated tournament series that was to hold 5 events across
Europe per year, and was to be called The Millennium Series.
The backbone for that series was provided by the Mayhem and
Toulouse events with the other 3 event locations varying from year
to year across Europe. A new era of European paintball had begun
with Steve and Laurent setting the direction.
Laurent went onto invent the Sup’ Air format in the late nineties
and oversaw the international evolution of our sport as it gradually
adopted the inflatable bunker fields that we now have.
On the other side of the pond in 2002, Richmond had introduced
X-Ball onto the unsuspecting world of paintball, and it was this
introduction that irrevocably changed the face of tournament
paintball. And so, Steve, Laurent and Richmond have each
contributed to the foundations of our modern game albeit in such
an uncoordinated fashion, it took time to coalesce. However, we
needed to consolidate our sport internationally, not just in the US
and Europe which meant we needed to have one rule book and
one playing format but before any proposed changes could be
made, our sport/industry needed to agree on what to do, how to
do it and when.
The industry and various national federations across the world of

paintball were unable to come to an agreement and so the issue
soon became a bit of a white elephant. This was revisited several
times, but none of them proved to be successful. Of course, it was
easier said than done. What we needed was a different approach
under different circumstances. Looking back, we lacked cohesion,
direction and industry clout, and it wasn’t until recently (last year)
that the ducks all lined up. And then all that was needed was the
right men in the right place, and pivotal to this was Richmond Italia.
It had seemed as though our sport’s final consolidation was but a
fool’s errand. However, fate was preparing to make a spectacular
entrance that was about to overturn our industry’s status quo and
landscape. And as a consequence of that industry change, the
ability to negotiate our sport/industry’s main problem was finally
put into place.

COMETH THE HOUR COMETH THE MAN
I think most people in our sport/industry realize that the US has the
most important input into any major changes to our sport, and it
was to be their league and industry involvement that would finally
secure the consolidation we had all attempted in the past. If you
are not aware of what’s been happening in our industry in the past
year or so, then I’ll give a brief synopsis. Most people know, or at
least heard of Richmond Italia, but here’s an attempt to detail his
paintball CV. Richmond started out as a paint distributor and indoor

www.paintball.media

125