Gold standard: Omega's greatest Olympic watches

FOR A WATCH designer, there’s probably worse briefs than coming up with a concept to mark the Olympic Games. There’s certainly plenty to work with. For starters, the Olympic flag is a brightly coloured set of rings which are [checks notes] round like watch dials. Winning Olympians receive medals made from gold, silver or bronze, materials that are also big in watchmaking. And the Games is hosted by a different country each time. That should allow plenty of scope to come up with, say, a frosted white dial to commemorate the Winter Olympics in Beijing. Or a bright poppy one for the Summer Olympics in Rio.

Omega, which has served as official timekeeper to the Olympic Games since 1932 and the Paralympic Games since 1992, has been releasing “Olympic editions” of its watches since the mid-Fifties. It has used all the above ideas, and plenty more besides – including creating a dial with five overlapping chronograph counters, arranged like the Olympic rings.

Of the models in Omega’s catalogue its Speedmaster and Seamaster lines have lent themselves most naturally to Olympic makeovers, with their connections to stopwatches and diving respectively.

“Most of the time we try to use sport watches,” Gregory Kissling, Omega’s VP of product tells me. “And we basically have two families of them, Speedmaster, with the chronograph and Seamaster, with the three-hand movement.”

But Omega has also created Olympic editions from everything from its Constellation and De Ville dress watch lines to rarities found in its museum archives. For the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia it took an obscure barrel-shaped Art Deco watch from 1915 and rebranded it as the Omega Sochi Petrograd 2014.

On Wednesday the brand announced its latest Olympic release, the Paris 2024 Bronze Gold Edition – a vintage-looking dress watch that mixes together elements of bronze, gold and silver, inspired by an archive model from 1939.

Omega also has what it calls its Timeless Collection, Olympic editions that look like stopwatches, reinforcing the link to the brand’s timekeeping history that dates to the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. That’s when a lone watchmaker was dispatched from Biel, Switzerland with 30 high-precision stopwatches in his luggage. Olympic officials in suits and ties then manned the finish lines, clicking a button each time an athlete romped home.

Accuracy was measured at one-tenth of a second. In 2024 it is measured at one-millionth of a second.

“Today, everything is electronic,” Kissling says. “No more mechanical features for timing the games. So, there’s a kind of gap between our collection and the devices we turn to for the Olympics.” Kissling says that creating an Olympic edition watch is not as straightforward as we may have implied. “You need to validate everything with both the host country and the IOC [International Olympic Committee] in Lausanne [in Switzerland],” he says.

“It’s quite tricky. You have to respect the colour coding, the dimensions, the proportions. It’s not like doing a billboard. It’s a collaboration. You always have this dual logo – Omega, and the Olympic Games. But we always find a solution. We are Swiss! We like doing compromises.”

Here, we look back at a a handful of great-looking Olympic watches from Omega’s storied back catalogue.

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Seamaster Chrono-Quartz “Montreal 1976”

The first watch ever to combine an analogue display with a digital one. It was borne out of a time of great disruption for the Swiss business, then under siege by cheap quartz watches from the East. And who couldn’t love this groovy Seventies sci-fi design, said to mimic Olympic scoreboards?

“It was the very beginning of Omega using quartz,” says Kissling. “Our quartz watches were much more expensive than ones with mechanical movements. To give you an idea, the regular Speedmaster was sold at roughly £175 back then [the entry level Speedy costs £6,200 today]. This watch was for sale for more than £300 – almost double the price.”

Since it required two movements, the Chrono-Quartz was a big boy – 152 grams in weight and 51mm in width, if you include the pushers. And if it stopped working, you were in trouble. “It was impossible to repair, because you had to replace the module,” Kissling says.

Unveiled during the Games and retired just two years later, apparently for bucking one of the key attributes of quartz watches (they tend to be thin), it was nicknamed “Albatross”. The Chrono-Quartz has since achieved cult status, helped by the fact that only 15,000 were ever made. Given today’s gap between mechanical timekeeping on the wrist and electronic timekeeping at the Games, perhaps Omega could bring this one back?

“Could be an option,” Kissling says. “It’s not something we have planned.”

Seamaster Polaris Albertville “Barcelona 1992”

By 1992, Omega’s Olympic timing had increased in accuracy by a couple of decimal places, up to a thousandth of a second. At the Winter Games in Albertville, France speed skaters were measured by cutting-edge new technology with the unimprovable name of Omega Scan‘O’Vision. The brand marked the occasion with another quartz watch intended to look futuristic and hip.

“This one was limited edition of 499 pieces,” Kissling says. “All our Olympic editions used to be limited editions, to add the angle of rarity. But since Tokyo 2020 we decided to stop that because we always had frustrated customers. ‘No more of these limited watches!’”

The Polaris was created 10 years earlier by watch design royalty Gérald Genta and was originally a basic, no-date three-hander. Its lozenge-shaped case was unusual, but the real showstopper were the asymmetrical 2mm strips of 24-carat gold in the case, which are inlaid rather than plated.

Omega has never revealed how it did this.

Seamaster 1948 “London 2012”

With so much history tied up in the Games, who couldn’t forgive the watchmaker a little self-referential fun from time to time? The Seamaster, a version of an elegant but all-purpose watch Omega had supplied to the MoD during World War II, was launched in 1948. That was the same year London hosted the Olympics.

When the Games returned as the London 2012 Summer Olympics, it was fitting that this was the model Omega turned to.

The Seamaster 1948 “London 2012” came with a revamped opaline dial tastefully decorated with 18ct white gold hour markers and a small seconds hand finished in blue. Branding is minimal, with the Olympics 2012 logo on the back of the watch. It’s a classy number – Daniel Craig made the Seamaster 1948 part of Benoit Blanc’s just-so wardrobe in 2022’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.

“The dial is just amazing with the silver opaline finish, and it’s domed,” Kissling says. “It was produced in a very low production of just 1,948. It’s a rarity now.”

Seamaster “Bullhead” “Rio 2016”

A break from the more traditional Seamaster/Speedmaster designs in Omega’s Olympic portfolio.

For this remix of a watch from the 1960s, the “Bullhead” moves the chronograph pushers and crown from the side to the top of the case – emphasising its stopwatch origins.

The colour scheme proved too jazzy for some, but it was of a piece with the Games’ location.

“The Bullhead was a great Seamaster,” Kissling says. “It was used for timing rallies as well. I like the position of the pushers. The crown is very, very comfortable on the wrist. You have a kind of incline display. It’s a great watch.”

Speedmaster Chronoscope “Paris 2024”

Produced in Omega’s own-brand gold – “Moonshine Gold” – the Chronoscope’s dial features three different scales.

“It makes the link between mechanical watch movements and electronic timing at the Olympics,” Kissling says. “Because the Chronoscope is not solely used for timing an event but, thanks to the different scales, it can be also to time speed with the tachymeter scale, to time a heartbeat with the pulsometer scale, and to time distance with the telemeter scale.”

It’s an information-rich offering Kissling sees as having parallels in Paris.

“This year we have introduced AI at the Games,” he says, of new systems that offer viewers insights into athletes’ biometric data for the first time.

“Every year we introduce new technologies, not only for timing but also to more fully animate the sporting events.”

Speedmaster “Tokyo 2020”

Five new Speedmasters were released for the Tokyo Games, each with an anodised aluminium bezel ring in one of the Olympic flag’s colours.

This was a Japan-only release, something that added incalculable helpings of hype of collectability.

“We have two crazy Speedmaster markets,” Kissling says. “Italy and Japan. And Japan always wanted us to introducing specific Speedmaster special editions – Japan editions. They wanted something very special, very exclusive. So, we said ‘Okay there’s enough stock here just for one country. If you want this watch, you have to go to Japan’.”

The red one earned the nickname “Rising Sun”. Of course it did.

(The above picture, plus the Montreal 1976 one, come courtesy of our friend and owner of one of the finest Omega collections in all the world, Stevie Mac. Thanks Stevie! If you have any interest in Omega – and if you’ve got this far, fingers crossed – give him a follow on Instagram, @steviemac1040.)

Olympic Pocket Watch 1932 Rattrapante Chronograph

While it’s true that Omega’s Olympic sponsorship dates back to 1932, that description overlooks a hiatus from 1996-2004 when Seiko, Longines and Swatch all took turns. Omega was back with conviction in the 20th Olympic Winter Games in Turin in 2006.

That’s when it launched three very fancy pocket watches that explicitly referenced the stopwatches it sent to LA seven decades earlier. Produced in white gold, red gold and 18ct yellow gold, they were intended to match the colours of Olympic medals.

“These three timepieces feature the original movement from 1932,” says Kissling.

“We went back to those gears, barrel, everything. We completely refurbished the movement and put it in this design, each one is a limited edition of 100.” Prices were almost $200,000 per watch. That’s if you could find one.

Seamaster Olympic Games Limited Edition Collection

The dials were inspired by the stark legibility of the stopwatches used during the mid-1970s Games at Montreal and Innsbruck.

“This is a great design, I have to say,” says Kissling.

The watches were released in 2018 and came in five colourways, one for each of the Olympic rings. They were also available as a boxset. Included in the later was a miniature last-lap bell, made by the same Swiss foundry that makes the actual Olympic bells, an element of tradition that endures today.

This release also nodded to the future – 2,032 versions of one each were made, representing the year 2032, which will be Omega’s 100th as Official Timekeeper. Because you can never celebrate an anniversary too early.

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This story originally appeared on Esquire UK