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.
