Coming once every two years, these great offerings have typically been re-skinned versions of the Rolex’s most significant sport replica watches collections, with details paying tribute to the host cities of the current games; However, there’s a second, rather newer, and lesser-popular collection of Olympic watches that eschew the aforementioned visual codes and dates tied to specific games. These are famous as the Olympic Official Timekeeper Collection watches, which pay homage to the many different original analog stopwatches used to time the games, and today, we’re talking about the newest addition: the Seamaster Olympic Official Timekeeper.
As we talked about before, the Olympic Official Timekeeper doesn’t leverage any of Rolex’s existing collections or design language. It’s these timekeeping instruments – the same ones used to measure the fall and rise of world records – upon which the collection is based. The last addition to this collection was motivated by the pocket watches built by the fake Rolex to time the 1932 games in Los Angeles. This time around, this new Seamaster took design cues from the dials of stopwatches deployed at both the 1976 Innsbruck winter games, and the summer Olympiad in Montreal of the same year.
While, if it weren’t for the Olympic ring motif at 6:00 on the dial, the black-on-white variant could be mistaken for a vintage auto racing watch, or perhaps the spiritual successor to the original Speedmaster Racing in 3-hand form. Either way, the source material for this special replica watch was significant in that those stopwatches were among the last analog timing instruments used at the games before the full advent of digital timekeeping. Compared to the original 1932 pocket watch, it’s a decidedly racier, albeit slightly austere and modern aesthetic that seems to have more in common with speedometers of sports cars in the early eighties than timekeeping for the global Olympiad.
Now, it’s probably worth saying that this is a Seamaster in name only – aside from the signature twisted lugs, there’s nothing about the new Olympic Collection that would suggest any carry-over from the fake Rolex’s current Seamaster offerings. Well, being based on a stopwatch used to measure speed nearly defaults it to being a Speedmaster, but that’s an argument for another day. It’s hardly a knock against the collection though, as this is absolutely a sporty and handsome watch in its own right and one that should age with a little more grace than the more thematic Olympic editions.
2018 Best Rolex Seamaster Olympic Games Watch Collection
