The Last Word

As the Official Timekeeper for the Olympics, there is a tremendous onus that comes with the role. After all, the Olympics is the world's stage where human excellence is measured down to the minutiae. By that standard, OMEGA's competence in the timekeeping field is also measured.

- Wayne Cheong

The start of the itinerary was met with little fanfare. We arrived at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport in the early morning, waiting with the Despite the lazy morning traffic and barricades appearing nearer to the city centre, the journey to the Mandarin Oriental in Rue Saint-Honoré took about 45 minutes (a shy 12 minutes over from Google Maps' estimated 33 minutes). OMEGA Hospitality Programme is pulling out the stops to warrant that everything goes like clockwork. From our stay at the Mandarin Oriental, which OMEGA took over for the duration of the Paris Olympics, to being able to attend the games, the entire operation was a well-oiled machine.

This sort of fastidiousness is not foreign to a company like OMEGA.

Like their watchmaking, precision is paramount. Adherence to the schedule notwithstanding, there was the pressure of ensuring that the games' timekeeping was up to snuff. OMEGA has to oversee 329 Olympic events across 32 sports, operate 435 scoreboards, and manage 530 timekeepers and professionals to operate the equipment.

Timekeeping has always struck me as an insurmountable charge - a Sisyphean task. Time has existed before Homo sapiens and will continue to exist after our sun dies out. Our mammalian brains dream of how to stem it or control it even, but we cannot corral a wild and bestial presence. You cannot mount it and break its spirit. We are rocks that are worn down by time's rushing waters.

So, no. Linguistically, we cannot "keep time" as much as we can master it. But we can catalogue its passing. We can categorise it into months and days into easily digestible numbers. We can capture its ghost in photographs and videos, and even record human achievements. Mea culpa if I sound profound, wanky even. Given that Paris has been the cornerstone of almost every influential philosophical movement, it would appear that I am caught up in its environment.