Every other sport keeps score. Cycling keeps time.
You can win a bike race without ever crossing the line first. You can lose one having led it for three weeks. What settles it, when the shouting stops, is the number on the clock, and the sport has been built around that number since before there was a yellow jersey to argue over or a Tour to award it in. That is the thread that ties the bicycle to the watch, and it has been pulling tight for more than a century.
The man who made the obsession official
On 11 May 1893, a former law clerk named Henri Desgrange rode 35.325 kilometres in an hour around the Buffalo velodrome in Paris. He was honest about his own ability. He set the mark, he said, simply to give the others something to aim at. The International Cycling Association ratified it as the first official Hour record, and in doing so it planted an idea at the centre of the sport: that a rider alone against the clock, with no rival to chase and no wheel to sit on, is the purest measure of what a person can do.
Ten years later, the same man invented the Tour de France. The clerk who got fired for cycling to work — legend has it for showing his bare calves on the way — gave cycling both its grandest race and its quietest, cruellest test in the same lifetime.
The Hour: the test the greats could not leave alone
The Hour became the thing the greats could not leave alone. Fausto Coppi rode it during the war. Jacques Anquetil took it in the fifties. Then Eddy Merckx, already the most complete rider who ever lived, went to altitude in Mexico City in 1972 and covered 49.431 kilometres, afterwards calling it the hardest ride he had ever done. The man who won everything found his limit alone on a track with a clock for an opponent. Francesco Moser pushed it past 51 kilometres in 1984 on disc wheels and a skinsuit, and the argument about where the rider ends and the machine begins has never really stopped since.
The time trial earned its own name for all this. The race of truth. No tactics, no shelter, no one to blame. Just a rider, a road, and the seconds ticking down, and the truth of it written on the clock at the finish.
When the watchmakers understood the story
Which is the moment the watchmakers understood there was a story here worth their name.
Tissot had been timing sport since 1938. It became official timekeeper of the Tour de France from 1988 to 1992, tied itself to the UCI in 1995, and came back to the Tour in 2016 in a far bigger role, timing road, track, mountain bike and BMX across the world. The numbers behind the work are quietly mad. Across the three weeks of a modern Tour, a handful of Tissot timekeepers and their technicians make something in the region of 4,200 photo-finish judgements. They exist for the days when a stage, or a whole race, comes down to less than the eye can split.
Those days are the ones we remember. In 1989, after 87 hours of racing across more than 3,200 kilometres, the Tour came down to a 24.5-kilometre time trial into Paris. Greg LeMond started the day 50 seconds behind Laurent Fignon and rode the Frenchman down to win the Tour de France by eight seconds, the closest finish in its history. Three weeks of mountains and crosswinds and suffering, settled by a margin a watch can measure and a human cannot feel. That is the sport telling you what it actually is.
The chapter the sport would rather forget
Then there is the chapter the sport would rather forget, and a watch brand is standing in the middle of it.
Festina is a watch company. Through the nineties it was also the name on one of the strongest teams in the peloton, sponsoring the squad of Richard Virenque, the climber the French adored. In July 1998 the Tour started in Dublin, rolling out along the Irish coast before crossing to France. As it did, customs officers stopped a Festina team car at the border and found it loaded with EPO, growth hormone and testosterone. The soigneur driving it was Willy Voet.
What followed pulled the sport apart in public: police raids on team hotels, riders detained, confessions, whole teams climbing off in protest. Festina were thrown out of their own sponsored race. Marco Pantani won that Tour, and was himself undone by doping not long after. The brand had put its name on cycling for the visibility, and got the most visible disgrace in the sport's history. A watch company's name remains welded to the day cycling nearly destroyed itself.
The strange part: a century of bare wrists
For all that closeness between bikes and timekeeping, here is the strange part. For most of the sport's life, no rider wore a watch to race.
The logic was simple and it was the logic of the whole sport. You do not carry the clock. You race it. The timing lives at the side of the road, in the commissaire's hands, in the photo-finish rig, never on the wrist, where it would only cost you grams and tell you nothing you could use. For a hundred years the racing wrist was bare, and that felt correct.
Richard Mille and the $300,000 wrist
Richard Mille tore that up. The brand does not really make watches the way the old houses do; it makes engineering objects out of materials borrowed from aerospace and Formula One, and it wants them seen in the thickest part of the action rather than locked in a podium box. Its way into cycling is the RM 67-02. The watch weighs 32 grams. It is built from grade-5 titanium and layered carbon composite, an automatic that runs off the rider's own movement, and it sells for somewhere north of 300,000 dollars depending on who is doing the selling.
So now the bare wrist is gone, and in its place is the most expensive accessory in the bunch. Richard Mille sponsors UAE Team Emirates, and Tadej Pogačar races in the RM 67-02. So does Mathieu van der Poel. Mark Cavendish wore one taking his record 35th Tour stage. The watch has become, depending on your mood, the ultimate flex or the ultimate absurdity: a sport that shaves grams off everything, where engineers will redesign a derailleur to save the weight of a few paperclips, strapping the price of a house to the wrist of the rider going full gas.
When the absurdity drew blood
At the 2025 Paris-Roubaix, the absurdity drew blood. Pogačar went down on the pavé with around 35 kilometres to race, and the RM on his wrist cut into him as he hit the ground. He got back on and chased, his white glove slowly turning red around a watch worth more than the team car he was chasing. Van der Poel won that day, wearing the same model. Two of the best riders of their generation, settling the hardest one-day race on earth, both carrying a small fortune on the arm that was bleeding.
Not everyone plays the same game with it. Julian Alaphilippe was wearing the RM 67-02 as far back as 2020, and now rides for a team with Tudor as its title sponsor, the watch becoming part of the jersey rather than a personal trophy. The brands have worked out what Festina worked out and Tissot has known for decades. Cycling sells time, and time is the one thing a watch is actually for.
Which brings it back to your wrist, and mine
We measure everything now. Watts, heart rate, the climb you just did against the climb you did last year, the whole ride sliced into numbers before you have finished your coffee. The head unit on the bars is a coach that never stops talking, always asking for a little more. The watch is the one piece of timekeeping in the whole setup that is not nagging you to go harder. It does not care about your FTP. It just marks the hours, the same hours Desgrange was chasing on a wooden track in 1893, the same eight seconds that separated LeMond from Fignon.
Pros wear theirs because somebody pays them to. The rest of us wear ours for a different reason. The computer measures the effort. The watch marks something the power file never will. We buy them for the comeback season, the gran fondo we weren't sure we'd finish, the birthday that was supposed to slow us down. Pogačar didn't pay for his. You paid for yours, and you know exactly which ride earned it.
If you want the hours you put in to actually add up — the four pillars structured around your week instead of guessed at — NDY coaching at Roadman writes that for you, and the application is where the conversation starts. Got a question of your own about racing the clock? Ask Roadman for an answer drawn from the actual coach and rider conversations on the podcast.
