A Champion's Medal Lost in a Livestream Game: Baolan and the Cost of Clout
A small piece of esports hardware has become the talk of Chinese gaming forums this week: a 2018 League of Legends world championship medal, reportedly lost by the man who won it during a livestream PK battle.
Baolan, the former support for Invictus Gaming, was taking part in the kind of head-to-head livestream contest that Chinese platforms use to drive gifts and viewer traffic. According to reports circulating on November 7, the medal — a physical award from the 2018 world championship — ended up going to the other side of the contest. Baolan later told viewers that he had only lent it out, not sold or given it away permanently.
The 2018 title is not a minor trophy. Invictus Gaming, known as iG, won the League of Legends World Championship that year, the first time a team from China’s LPL league had taken the title. For a generation of Chinese fans, that roster is the origin story of the country’s modern esports boom. Baolan, whose real name is Wang Liuyi, was its support player, and the medal is a rare physical trace of that run.
That is why the reaction has been sharp. Some fans treated it as an accident, a stunt gone wrong in a format built on escalating stakes. Others saw something more uncomfortable: a former champion using the most tangible proof of his career as a bargaining chip in a livestream game, and then having to explain that it was only borrowed. The medal’s current whereabouts are the subject of continued speculation among fans.
The episode is a window into how retired or semi-retired Chinese esports players make a living. Competitive careers are short, and the years after them are often spent converting a share of past glory into streaming revenue. PK battles, gift rankings and viewer challenges are the machinery of that economy, and the pressure to raise the stakes is constant. A championship medal is an unusually personal thing to put on the table, but the logic of the format pushes in that direction.
The story has also revived a familiar debate about what a trophy means after the career ends. Unlike a jersey or a mousepad, a world championship medal has no replacement. It cannot be reissued by a platform or bought back from a marketplace. Its value is almost entirely sentimental, which is exactly what makes it useful as a piece of livestream theatre and painful to lose.
For now, Baolan’s account is that the medal was lent, not surrendered. Whether that settles the matter will depend on what happens next. Fans are watching for one of two things: confirmation that the medal is back in his hands, or a clearer account of where it went. Either way, the incident has left a mark on how Chinese esports audiences think about the afterlives of their early champions.
The broader lesson is not really about one medal. It is about a scene where the value of a career is increasingly measured in engagement, and where the symbols of that career can become props in the same feed. For a player whose defining moment came in 2018, that is a strange place to find a piece of history.