A Sporting Chance

The steel sports watch rules over watchmaking at all levels, but especially at a certain threshold of exclusivity. We examine the reasons for the unprecedented demand for this type of ticker

- Ashok Soman

This is a story that insisted on being told. It emerges from a question that does not need to be asked, but plenty of people discuss it anyway. In short, it concerns the appetite for luxury sports watches and certain design sensibilities that define said watches. Was the desire for such watches always there, or did watchmaking firms create the demand? To put it another way, using a more relatable and entirely plebeian example, did people always want the Internet or is it merely a tool that people took to? As you might guess, asking the sports watch question certainly gets interesting answers, but the entire affair seems academic.

The trouble of course is that there is no such thing as a luxury sports watch, and there exists no working definition for it. It is certainly not necessarily round, nor must it be especially robust; it need not even be in any particular material. Paradoxically, the luxury sports watch is very much a real thing, and virtually every brand has one watch that approaches some sort of ephemeral ideal. All of this amounts to lots of waffling and pointless pontificating, which does not make it an attractive story to pursue, objectively.