As Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli’s 75-foot silver bullet sluices between two yellow buoys at 40 knots, a digital timer appears in the bottom left corner of the Louis Vuitton Cup broadcast. The graphic flashes Omega’s logo and then starts counting up as soon as the boat’s transom creams past the buoy. Two deadbeat seconds later, the 75-footer of American Magic careens past the same mark at 36 knots in hot pursuit of the Italians.
The delta is a blink-and-miss-it 2 seconds, which is a heap of time in the Olympic and Paralympic events that Omega has “officially timed” since 1932, but in today’s America’s Cup races, 2 seconds is nothing. With millions of dollars and years spent obsessively developing the fastest boat possible, time is the one commodity these race teams can never have enough of in their pursuit of the oldest trophy in all of sport. When it comes to the Cup, time is indeed money.
The cliché comes to mind as my eyes are glued to the large-screen television inside AC75 Club hospitality suite overlooking Barcelona’s yacht-filled Marina Port Vell. The Louis Vuitton Cup race on screen is playing out in real time on Mediterranean racecourse a few miles away, and here in the Catalonian capital on this fine late September day, Omega representatives from Switzerland, who distinguish themselves during introductions as “HQs,” are hosting an eclectic group of luxury lifestyle and yachting journalists, as well as watch aficionados and collectors who speak eloquently and expertly of movements, calibers, escapements and the fine art of old-school mechanical watch making.
The zealots, I will soon learn, all have an utter disdain for quartz and anything with batteries and microchips for that matter.
We’ve been ushered in from Australia, Italy, England, the United States and elsewhere to experience the America’s Cup scene and the gastronomy of Barcelona, but first we are privy to the unveiling and the “touch-and-try” of Omega’s third official timepiece for this 37th edition of the America’s Cup.
Lucien Jornod, Omega’s VP of Marketing and Head of Media Strategy chez Swatch Group, takes to the stage first and brings our attention to a tall display case covered with a crisp white cloth, concealing the new specimen. It’s what we’re here to see, he says, and it will be revealed in due time, but first, a bit of history: The America’s Cup dates back to 1851 (three years before Omega’s founding) as an invitational race around England’s Isle of Wight.
The radical schooner that won the race that day was owned by a syndicate of New York Yacht Club members and named, well, duh, America. The New York YC then defended the America’s Cup in the waters off New York and Rhode Island for 132 years before an Australia team staged the upset of all upsets in 1983, halting the longest winning streak in all of sport.
Omega’s association with the Cup itself, however, stretches back to 1995 when they partnered with a scrappy and clever team from New Zealand, which cleaned everyone’s clocks on the waters off San Diego. The two have been partners ever since, and Omega has been the regatta’s official timekeeper four times—in 2000, 2003, 2021 and 2024.
“Timing in sailing isn’t always about speed,” Jornod says in his opening remarks. “It’s about coordination, teamwork and agility, and the America’s Cup aligns with Omega’s values of precision, innovation, excellence and, of course, ocean heritage.”
While other luxury watch makers have their hands in the Cup of present—Tudor with a Swiss team and Panerai with the Italians—Omega gets top billing on the broadcast, on the water and on the streets of Barcelona where luxury watches are in high-demand by the city’s notorious pickpockets, says Emirates Team New Zealand boss Grant Dalton, who eventually joins Jornod on stage.
“It’s an amazing city with wonderful people, but be careful,” he adds, raising his arm high and pointing to the $13,000 Seamaster Deep Black Planet Ocean ETNZ 600M on his wrist. “This is what they want.”
The watch that Dalton sports is the first of three distinct America’s Cup branded watches for the 37th edition. The second is the stainless steel Seamaster Diver 300M ($6,500), distinguished by an undulating wave pattern on the white ceramic face, a blue rotating countdown bezel, a sapphire crystal case back with the regatta’s logo etched into it and the America’s Cup trophy—the “Auld Mug”— laser etched into the counterweight of the second hand.
A few of the watch journalists present thought it was odd enough that Omega would introduce three watches for one event, but when the reveal finally comes they’re gobsmacked.
Inside the display is the Seamaster Regatta—an “instrument” watch, and inside of it is—gasp—quartz. Equally shocking is the LCD display behind the face and its red and blue sweeping hands. Unenthusiastic claps from the collectors are telling, and later, when I query two of them for their honest opinions of the $7,500 watch, one simply shrugs his shoulders and says, “meh.”
During the touch-and-try session that follows, the Regatta’s young product manager, Daniel (he preferred not to provide his surname before checking with HQ), admits that the watch is not necessarily for savvy collectors who only value mechanical timepieces and squirrel them away in bank vaults.
“This is a niche product,” he says. “It’s really a tool watch, but also a very traditional watch. It’s not something completely crazy and is fully in the Omega DNA: the same principle and quality. It is so much more advanced than a traditional watch, which only has time and date.”
It’s not often that Omega mashes digital and analog into one, so this, Daniel says, is a new bold addition to the Seamaster lineage. Its 46.57mm case is Grade 5 titanium and it does much more than tell time and date: there’s a moon phase indicator, a chronograph, a sailing log book, temperature gauge, accelerometer, three alarms, and of course, the regatta race functions.
There are four rubber pushers and a crown, so I quiz Daniel on how all the buttons work and how many presses it takes to get to the functions that sailors would use—primarily the countdown feature universally used for racing starts that countdown from 5 minutes. For the user keen to tap all of its functionality, there’s a 60-plus-page user manual online.
By rotating the rubber-gripped crown, Daniel explains, I can then page through functions on the digital display and press “P3” to go deeper into the menus, but it’s easiest to simply press the red pusher “P4” on the upper left that takes the user straight to the timer function once its preset. The same button starts and stops the countdown timer, and two short presses will sync it either up or down to the closest minute. There’s an audible countdown during the final 10 seconds (loud enough to be heard in the crowded AC37 suite) and then the timer automatically switches to and displays elapsed time.
A short press of the P4 button saves a time stamp, a function that sailors would use to record key moments in a race—say passing a mark of the course. These timestamps are recorded in the watch’s “sailing log,” but because it’s not a smart watch it cannot and does not connect to Bluetooth to output log data.
With the unveiling complete, probing questions asked, and social posts broadcast to the larger watch-media world, the group eventually saunters off to the AC75 Club’s terrace, spilling hushed opinions into champagne flutes and beer glasses. Off in the distance on this sun-kissed afternoon in Barcelona, the AC75s that we’ve also come to see are zooming back and forth across the horizon, playing their ancient analog sport onboard yachts laden with digital sophistication.
Many diehard America’s Cup fans of yesteryear despise the technical bastardization of their favorite sailing event and pine for a return to traditional sailing, much as I suspect the astute watch experts gazing at the boats with wonder and fascination will no doubt opine that the Regatta is the newborn digital bastard child of the Seamaster family.
But we are indeed living in a digital age and technology advances whether we like it or not. When a 2-second delta on the America’s Cup racecourse is worth millions, and it’s win or lose, the watchers will watch. For sailors with an appreciation for Cup nostalgia looking for a sharp-looking collectible timepiece, the Seamaster Regatta will serve many purposes: from a night on the town, to the club and to the racecourse, to simply being on time the old-fashioned way.
