A Movement for Each Sport: The Ultimate in Custom Builds

Can you acquire a watch equipped with a movement especially designed for your favorite activity? It might seem a prohibitively expensive idea, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been done…

Welcome to the world of ultra-luxury. Everything is allowed – provided you can afford it. Working within this paradigm, some manufactures don’t do things by halves: they’ve designed entire movements dedicated to the favorite pastime of their clients or ambassadors. These ‘custom’ calibers require years of development, even if they never serve any other purpose.

The RM Initials

You need a very high-level customer base to embark on an adventure like this. One brand has made doing so its speciality, if not its raison d’etre: Richard Mille. Twenty years ago, Richard Mille himself turned the watch production model upside down: rather than designing a product best suited to a target audience on the basis of his capabilities, he started with the end customer, noted their specifications, and went on to make them their very own bespoke timepieces.

The end customers in question are usually top-level athletes, the most famous among them being Rafael Nadal. Nadal famously could not stand having a watch on his wrist while he was holding a tennis racket. He changed his mind when Richard Mille designed a custom-built watch for him in 2010: a composite carbon model with a 3.83-gram titanium movement dubbed the RM 027. And that was just the start of the saga. In 2011, it was followed by the RM 035 (with a 4.3-gram movement), capable of withstanding acceleration of 5g, then in 2013 by the RM 27-01, the RM 35-01 in 2014, the RM 27-02 Rafael Nadal in 2015, the RM 27-03 in 2017, and now by a timepiece celebrating 10 years of partnership with the Majorcan champion: the RM 27-04, a manual wind tourbillon equipped with a 3.4-gram movement that weighs just 30 grams in total – strap included.

Nadal may be Richard Mille’s chief standard-bearer, but the brand has repeated the exercise many times with other champions: an RM 70-01 to allow Alain Prost to tot up how many kilometers he’s covered by bike, an RM 61-01 for Yohan Blake so that he can run wearing his watch, an RM 58-01 so that Jean Todt can travel on universal time, an RM 62-01 to provide Airbus Corporate Jet clients with an alarm on their wrists, an RM 38-01 to enable Bubba Watson to measure the g-forces of his golf swing, and more besides.

Hole in One

Several brands have been attracted to golf, dedicating specific calibers to the discipline. The best-known is Jaermann & Stübi. This small, Swiss Made firm has become highly specialized in the field, creating a module that can count the number of strokes per hole, the hole currently being played, and the overall score compared to the handicap. It was later joined by Hublot with its Big Bang Unico Golf. The putter-shaped pusher at 2 o’clock activates a mechanism to display the number of strokes played that also counts strokes per hole. The pusher at 4 o’clock is used when moving on to the next hole, resetting the counter. The counter at 6 o’clock displays the total number of strokes played, updating in parallel. The pusher at 8 o’clock resets the mechanism and the counters at the end of the course. It can be locked by swiveling it through 45°, thus ensuring it can’t be set off accidentally.

Competition 3.0

These brands have remained in the mechanical tradition but have quickly found themselves in competition with other Swiss firms that have opted to produce smart watches, such as TAG Heuer. Obviously, the latter’s functionalities are something else altogether, with hundreds of pre-recorded courses, distances covered, club recommendations, 2D and 3D maps with the related applications, and so on.

Trim your Sails…

When clients are not playing golf, they are probably sailing in a regatta. Panerai and Audemars Piguet have spotted an opportunity there, designing a specific movement that counts down the time to the start of the race. The caliber is interesting from a technical point of view, since it is a countdown mechanism: nothing less than a reverse chronograph. Panerai made this something of a specialty, with its Luminor Regatta model, as did Audemars Piguet in the early 2000s, notably through its partnership with Alinghi; its Royal Oak Offshore offered a countdown window to mark off the last ten minutes before the race, and more especially the last five minutes, which are crucial in the pre-departure phase, when maneuvering can provide a key an advantage over rivals.

…or Take a Deep Dive

For those who prefer to be under the water rather than on it, Oris is acclaimed for having created a dedicated caliber featuring its Acquis Depth Gauge. This exploits Boyle’s law to display depth readings automatically beneath the bezel. To achieve this, water enters an aperture in the sapphire crystal at 12 o’clock before passing through a sunken channel around the outer edge of the crystal. Just right for knowing exactly how deep you were when you passed that manta ray…