Pro cycling and high-end watches have been intertwined for decades. Tissot is the official timekeeper for the Tour de France, Tudor sponsors a whole team, and then there’s Festina and Tag Heuer. Richard Mille is a very high-end brand in the world of watches and sponsors UAE Team Emirates, as well as Tadej Pogačar personally and other riders like Mathieu van der Poel, and formerly, Mark Cavendish, too.
At the Tour de France last year, we spotted Pogačar and Van der Poel wearing $350,000 Richard Mille RM 67-02 models; sports specific automatic watches (meaning they rely on the movement of the wearer for power rather than a battery) with elastic straps. There were no issues at the Tour for the pair, besides perhaps some worry about the cost of crashing wrist-first on any given stage, but things were very different at Paris-Roubaix.
At the Queen of the Classics last year, the brutal cobbles caused the crown of Pogačar’s watch to cut into his wrist to such a degree that it caused significant bleeding, clearly shown on the white of his world champion’s gloves.
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This year, a year on from his impressive second-place debut, the Slovenian appears to still be planning to race with the watch on, but it seems he’s learned from his prior misfortune. In Thursday’s recon rides, he was seen wearing the watch much higher up on his wrist, buffered to some degree by the long wrists of aero gloves.
This new watch placement is the tip of the iceberg in what has been a total overhaul of Pogačar’s cobble setup to try and take the last Monument victory still missing from his shining palmares. In swapping from the V5Rs to the aero Y1Rs means he’s no longer able to use the top section of the bars, as the cockpit of the Y1Rs only really allows the use of the hoods or the drops, which may mean his wrists are more in line with his hands and less likely to cause a repeat issue. An easier workaround may have been to wear the face on the inside of the wrist, but that may cause angst from the sponsors.
In addition to the new machine he will almost certainly be using the same foam hack under the brake levers we saw last year to keep his fingers from getting abraded, as wide a set of tyres as will fit in the frame, and the standard Y1Rs computer mount that would allow the computer to pivot downwards under extreme force rather than snapping off, as presumably would be the worry with his usual 3D printed aero shroud-mount.
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