You’ve Heard of Dive Watches. Are High-End Cycling Watches the Next Frontier?

What is a cycling watch?

Well, if you ask most people who cycle as a hobby, you’ll probably get an answer that sounds a lot like your typical fitness watch. In other words, it will probably be a GPS-capable smartwatch from Garmin or a similar brand that tracks distance, calories burned and other metrics important to bike riders.

But, like all sports watches that are ostensibly aimed at people participating in actual sports, there is some wiggle room. If you choose to wear a luxury watch while cycling, then boom, you’ve got yourself a cycling watch.

Luxury watch brands have a long history of sporting partnerships, and while mechanical watches may have been useful tools on the field of competition decades ago, these days the connection is more about elevating a brand’s prestige by associating it with winning, competition and, oftentimes, a luxurious lifestyle.

Photo by Johnny Brayson for Gear Patrol

That’s why luxury watch brands most often sponsor athletic events that are associated with higher-income levels. Brands like Rolex, Richard Mille and Omega are heavily involved in “fancy” pro sports like Formula 1 racing, ATP Tour tennis and PGA Tour golf.

But those brands’ watches don’t play any realistic part in their sponsored athletes’ performance on the field. F1 drivers can’t even wear watches while competing. Most golfers choose not to, opting to don their watch for their trophy presentation instead. Rolex’s tennis testimonees do the same.

Some tennis players are known for wearing their Richard Mille, Norqain or De Bethune watch on the court, but they’re not really using the watch while competing; they wear a luxury watch on court because they like it (and because they’re getting paid to, in most cases).

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Which brings me back to cycling. Professional cycling may not be big yet in the U.S., but it has all the hallmarks of a sport that luxury watch brands normally flock to: There’s a high cost of entry, it requires state-of-the-art equipment, and it’s popular in Europe.

This could be why Tudor has bet big on cycling in recent years, as I saw firsthand when I was a guest of the brand at this year’s Grand Prix Cycliste de Québec, a professional road race in Quebec City, Canada that’s part of the UCI World Tour, the top pro cycling competition in the world.

Tudor’s presence at the event was all-encompassing.

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For starters, the brand was the official timekeeper of the race, with Tudor signage along the track, Tudor digital clocks tracking the race’s official time (which stretched on for more than five hours as the riders made 18 laps of the city-spanning circuit) and massive ads touting the brand’s cycling-specific chronograph, the Pelagos FXD Chrono Cycling Edition. The winner of the race also received a special one-of-one example of said watch with a special engraving on the caseback commemorating the victory.

But Tudor’s involvement went far beyond the typical role of an official timekeeper. The brand sponsors its own team — Tudor Pro Cycling — and is the only watch brand with an eponymous UCI team. Tudor’s team has only been competing since 2023, and it’s currently ranked as a UCI ProTeam, which is a rung below the top-ranked UCI WorldTeams. The team was invited to compete in the Québec race as one of two wild cards, the other being Team Canada.

In a twist that Tudor couldn’t have scripted better if it tried, Tudor Pro Cycling’s top rider — two-time UCI World Road Champion Julian Alaphilippe — won the Grand Prix Cycliste de Québec in a thrilling come-from-behind victory, taking the lead for the first time near the end of the final lap. As a result, he stood on the podium and received his special Tudor watch, while wearing a Tudor uniform, with a giant Tudor sign behind him.

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The whole spectacle was very Tudor-heavy, of course, and was a striking symbol of how heavily the luxury watch brand had infiltrated this sport. Tudor sponsors other sports, too — the Alinghi Red Bull Racing sailing team that competes at the America’s Cup, and the Racing Bulls F1 team — but cycling is the only sport where the brand is setting the pace, so to speak.

Other watch brands do have a presence in cycling, to be sure. Tissot is the official timekeeper of the Tour de France and has a line of dedicated cycling watches. Breitling and Richard Mille both sponsor UCI teams, with the former sponsoring the Q36.5 ProTeam and the latter supporting UAE Team Emirates, the top-ranked team on the UCI World Tour.

So, with all of these watch brands pouring money into pro cycling, this brings me back to the question of just what a cycling watch is, exactly?

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You can’t really point at a certain watch and say “that’s a cycling watch” like you can with other sport-specific genre watches like dive watches and regatta timers. But brands like Tudor are trying to make a case.

Tudor’s aforementioned cycling watch, the Pelagos FXD Chrono Cycling Edition, is a lightweight automatic chronograph with a 43mm carbon fiber case and a tachymeter scale that’s been recalculated to display speeds at which cyclists actually travel.

Breitling takes a fairly similar approach with its Endurance Pro, which is a quartz-powered chronograph with a case made of Breitlight, the brand’s proprietary carbon composite. Instead of a tachymeter, Breitling opts for a pulsometer scale, as the watch is also aimed at triathletes who, hypothetically, could track their heart rate while competing.

Richard Mille’s UAE Team Emirates cyclists wear the brand’s RM 67-02, an extremely lightweight and thin time-only automatic. But it’s hardly a cycling-specific watch. Other RM athletes in sports ranging from skiing to track and field to rally racing also wear the watch. If anything, the watch’s hulking crown has shown itself to be detrimental to cyclists, as evidenced by the bleeding wrist of Tadej Pogačar at this year’s Paris-Roubaix race.

Richard Mille

Tissot positions its T-Touch Connect Sport smartwatch as its main cycling watch, which I would argue competes more closely with the Garmins of the world than Tudor and Breitling. Then there’s a brand I haven’t yet mentioned, small indy watchmaker Bravur, which has made a name for itself with its cycling-inspired Grand Tour chronographs that feature 15-minute totalizers for “timing intervals.”

Going by the most common style, it would seem that a cycling watch — at least as defined by luxury watch brands — is a lightweight chronograph with some sort of cycling-specific tweak. But are such watches actually useful on the road?

I had a chance to take part in a group interview with the Tudor Pro Cycling team prior to the Grand Prix Cycliste de Québec. All members wear their FXD Chronos during the race, but none admitted to actually using them while competing. Every rider instead agreed that their cycling computers — bike-mounted electronic gadgets that track various metrics — were their most important piece of riding equipment.

But just because they’re not operating a chronograph while riding doesn’t mean the athletes see no value in wearing a cycling watch.

“It helps you look cooler,” one rider stated, with others concurring that a nice watch can offer a boost to one’s confidence while also serving to intimidate other riders who perhaps lack a luxury sponsor. “Mental game,” another rider added.

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“It’s really an honor to wear the jersey with a brand that you are proud to represent, and it’s an extra bonus as a rider [to wear the watch],” said Alaphilippe, who is the team’s biggest watch collector. He describes the Pelagos FXD Chrono as “super light” and “easy to wear,” but admits his favorite watch and daily driver is the more compact 37mm Tudor Black Bay 54.

Some riders also expressed admiration for Tudor’s watches on a deeper level, comparing their focus on precision and engineering expertise to cycling itself.

“You really have to dial in all the little details for the end product to be what it is. And you know, that goes for watchmaking but also in cycling,” said Larry Warbasse, the team’s road captain. “I mean, you have to get the training right, you have to get the fueling right, your diet, the recovery, all these little pieces make the final product, which is hopefully an excellent performance for us, or you know, a watch [for Tudor].”

So, where does that leave us in our quest to define a cycling watch? Well, I’d argue it puts us right back where we started. If you wear a watch while cycling and it makes you feel good, then you’ve got yourself a cycling watch. And if that watch happens to be a Tudor, then the evidence I’ve seen suggests you’ll feel pretty good indeed.

Hell, you might even win a race.

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