Issue 302 is on newsstands. With a cover story that recounts the second life of the El Primero calibre, now made in a time-only version, but with a unique feature: a tenths-of-a-second dial.
A tenth of a second, an almost imperceptible interval. Yet it cost Sofia Goggia the gold. It was Omega who timed those 1.6 tenths of a second, or 16 hundredths, that prevented Goggia from becoming a legend. Even if Sofia's silver medal feat is, legendary it is. Because if timekeeping had not become so accurate, the gold medal in the downhill at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics would probably have been a tie.
These days, we casually talk about hundredths of a second as if they were appreciable with the naked eye. But we know that it took more than a century of research, and specialised companies such as the Swatch Group's Swiss Timing, to arrive at measuring it with almost absolute precision. Swiss Timing is today with Omega at all Olympic events.
Sport has greatly driven the evolution of time measurement instruments. And not only since electronics took over. Longines is another name that owes a lot to timekeeping. It started with skiing and horse-riding, and went on to time all kinds of competitions, including motor racing, at the time of mechanical stopwatches, going so far as to appreciate the hundredth of a second. TAG Heuer, for its part, has been the official timekeeping partner of Ferrari and timekeeper of Formula One for a long time, with its timekeeping team, going so far as to measure the thousandth of a second. Seiko, the official timekeeper of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, developed the first Electronic Printer to print race times. When the company marketed the first mini printers in 1975, the name EPSON was coined, which stands for Electronic Printer Son. Today, Seiko constitutes only a small part of the Seiko Epson Corporation's business.
I told all this to show how the world of sport is not just a showcase for watchmaking, but a test, a challenge. And a way of reminding the world that timekeeping is serious business.
Dody Giussani
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