On 13 April 2025, Mathieu van der Poel crossed the finish line at the Roubaix velodrome with mud in his teeth, cobblestone grit embedded in every crease of his jersey, and a watch on his wrist that cost more than the average British house.
The Richard Mille RM 67-02. Carbon composite case. Grade 5 titanium. Approximately 32 grams on the wrist and approximately $350,000 at retail. It had spent more than five hours bouncing across the pavé of northern France, rattling through the Arenberg trench, and absorbing the kind of sustained violence that destroys components worth considerably less. When the television cameras found Van der Poel on the podium, the watch was still there, still running, still filthy. It was the single most expensive piece of sports equipment visible anywhere in the frame, and it was covered in the same muck as everything else.
That image — six figures of Swiss engineering caked in pavé grit — is worth understanding, because it tells you something about where cycling is now, where the money goes, and why a sport that agonises over the weight of bar tape has become the strangest runway in professional sport.
Thirty-two grams and a quarter of a million
Richard Mille was co-founded in 2001 by the man whose name is on the dial, alongside watchmaker Dominique Guenat. The brand's founding idea was simple and expensive: build watches the way Formula 1 teams build cars. Carbon fibre. Titanium. Sapphire crystal. Aerospace-grade materials bonded, layered and machined into cases so light they barely register on the wrist, housing movements skeletonised to the edge of what's structurally possible. The prices reflected the engineering — or the ambition, depending on your generosity — and started in the low six figures. The RM 67-02, the model that turns up in the peloton, sits around $350,000. Other models cross the million-dollar line without breaking stride.
The pitch was never about telling the time. Any quartz watch from a petrol station does that more accurately. The pitch was about surviving what the wearer survives. Richard Mille built its reputation on the wrists of people who do violent things for a living — Rafael Nadal hammering forehands at Roland Garros, Felipe Massa driving a Formula 1 car at 340 km/h, sprinters, tennis players, golfers. The watch goes where the athlete goes. If the athlete wins, the watch wins with them. If the conditions are brutal, so much the better. You cannot buy the photograph of Van der Poel in the Roubaix mud. You can only earn it by being there.
Cycling entered the picture in 2021 when Tadej Pogačar became a Richard Mille ambassador. He has since been photographed wearing the RM 67-02 climbing the Tourmalet, racing through the rain at Liège–Bastogne–Liège, and standing on the top step of the Tour de France podium in Paris. Mathieu van der Poel followed in early 2025 — the Roubaix image, the cyclocross world championship with mud up to the headset, the kind of pictures that no studio shoot could manufacture. Between them, the two most dominant riders of this generation carry more value on their wrists than most professional cycling teams spend on race bikes in a season.
Why cycling, specifically
Richard Mille sponsors athletes across a dozen disciplines, but cycling gives them something no other sport can match. Three things, specifically, and they compound.
First, the television hours. A flat stage of the Tour de France runs five to six hours of continuous live coverage. A mountain stage can run longer. The cameras sit on motorbikes a few metres from the riders. They shoot tight — hands on the bars, faces on the climbs, wrists visible in almost every close-up. For a watch brand, that is an absurd quantity of organic screen time. A tennis match might deliver two hours, mostly from above. A football match gives you ninety minutes and the players are wearing long sleeves. Cycling puts the wrist in the frame for the duration of a working day, and the biggest races run for three consecutive weeks.
Second, the weight. Cycling is the only mainstream sport where an athlete's performance is meaningfully affected by the weight of their equipment at the gram level. Riders shave legs partly for aerodynamics and partly for crash recovery, but also because the culture of gram-counting runs that deep. Teams weigh shoes. They weigh helmets. Specialized once drilled holes in the shell of a saddle to save a few grams for a climber. Into that world, a 32-gram watch barely registers. The RM 67-02 weighs less than a gel. Less than most pairs of sunglasses. Less than the difference between a full and empty bidon cage. The weight-obsessed sport is the one sport where wearing a mechanical watch during competition is not an obvious absurdity — it is a rounding error.
Third, the conditions. Road cycling punishes equipment in ways that make other sports look gentle. The cobblestones of Roubaix vibrate at frequencies that shake fillings loose. Mountain descents generate rain, grit, and cold in combination. Crashes happen at speed, on tarmac, with the wrist exposed. For a brand whose entire proposition is the watch survives what you survive, cycling is a product-testing theatre that runs three hundred days a year. A Richard Mille on Pogačar's wrist descending the Galibier in the rain tells you more about the watch's engineering than a thousand words of marketing copy ever could.
The economics of the wrist
Nobody publishes exact figures for Richard Mille's ambassador deals, but the structure is well understood. The brand pays the rider a retainer — reportedly in the range of several hundred thousand to low seven figures annually, depending on the athlete's profile — and supplies watches for racing and promotional use. In return, the rider wears the watch during competition, appears in brand content, and makes the watch visible in the images that cycling produces by the thousand.
The return on that investment is calculated in media value. When Pogačar crosses the line first at the Tour de France and the RM logo is visible on his wrist in every photograph syndicated to every sports desk on the planet, the cost of buying that exposure through paid media would dwarf whatever they're paying the rider. One stage win at the Tour, captured in the right frame, can generate millions of dollars in earned media. A Grand Tour victory — three weeks of daily coverage, the yellow jersey, the podium shots, the magazine covers — is a marketing event that money alone cannot fabricate.
And cycling's audience has shifted in ways that suit a luxury brand. The demographic watching the Tour de France is no longer exclusively the old guard of continental cycling fans. The audience now skews toward affluent, educated professionals — exactly the people who might, given the right nudge, put themselves on a waiting list for a $350,000 watch. The same audience, incidentally, that our community on Skool draws from — serious amateurs with professional careers who treat the sport as a craft, not a pastime.
The photograph you cannot brief
There's a difference between a marketing image and a real one. Cycling produces the real ones in ways no agency can plan.
Van der Poel taking the cyclocross world championship in Liévin in 2025, the RM visible on his wrist as he raised his arms on the finish straight. Pogačar attacking on the Poggio at Milan–San Remo, hands on the drops, the watch catching afternoon light on the Ligurian coast. And the Roubaix finish — you already know what that looked like.
These images work because they are not posed. The watch did not get a separate trailer and a cleaning crew. It went through what the rider went through, and the camera caught it the same way it catches everything in cycling — raw, close, and uncontrolled. A Swiss watch surviving the Arenberg trench is a story that sells itself. Richard Mille understood this before most of the watch industry had even noticed that professional cycling existed.
The other model
The natural comparison — and one I keep returning to — is Tudor.
Richard Mille and Tudor are both Swiss watch brands deeply embedded in professional cycling. The similarity ends there. Richard Mille operates an ambassador model: pay the rider, take the exposure, ask nothing of the sport beyond the wrist. When the race is finished, the watch goes back in its case and the relationship is transactional until the next start list. Tudor operates an ownership model: build a team, hire Fabian Cancellara to run it, sign Julian Alaphilippe and Stefan Küng, put riders on the start line with a bus and mechanics and soigneurs, and race the sport from the inside. One brand rents wrist space. The other bought a seat in the bunch.
Neither is wrong. Richard Mille's ambassador model generates extraordinary imagery and brand exposure for a fraction of what it costs to field a full professional team. Tudor's team model creates something deeper but harder to measure — credibility, permanence, the sense that the brand has skin in the game beyond a cheque. When Tudor's riders line up at the Tour of Flanders — a race Tudor also happens to time — they represent a commitment to cycling that no ambassador fee can replicate.
The telling detail is this: Richard Mille's cycling presence depends entirely on two riders. If Pogačar and Van der Poel retired tomorrow, the brand would need new ambassadors. Tudor's presence depends on an institution — a team, a licence, a structure that survives any single rider. That's a fundamentally different bet on the sport. I'm watching closely to see which model the rest of the industry follows.
What it means for the rest of us
Here's where it connects to the rest of us.
The fact that Richard Mille is pouring money into cycling tells you something about the sport's commercial trajectory. Luxury brands do not invest in shrinking markets. They invest in growing ones, and specifically in markets where the audience matches their customer profile. Richard Mille's presence in cycling — alongside Tudor's team, Breitling's heritage collection, Tissot's Tour de France timing contract, and TAG Heuer's long association with the sport — signals that professional cycling's audience is now valuable enough to attract the upper reaches of the luxury market.
That matters beyond the watch industry. Luxury brands are leading indicators. When they arrive, other premium sponsors follow. Prize money increases. Team budgets grow. The infrastructure around the sport improves. The quality of racing goes up because the money makes better preparation possible. The whole commercial engine that keeps a sport running at the professional level gets richer, and that eventually filters down to the events, the coverage, and the culture that the rest of us experience as fans.
None of which changes the fundamental truth about what most working cyclists wear on their wrist. The timing device that actually matters is still bolted to the bars — a Garmin, a Wahoo, the little black box that counts the watts and the seconds. The Casio on the wrist of the club time-triallist is no less part of the sport than the RM on Pogačar's. Both measure what cycling has always measured. One just costs three hundred and forty-nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty-five dollars more than the other.
The watch on the wrist is not the sport. But the sport on the wrist is a story — and right now, Richard Mille is telling it louder than anyone.
For the full picture of cycling's relationship with time, start with Against the Clock. For the brand that's doing it differently, read Tudor Pro Cycling: The Watch Brand That Crashed the Tour de France. And if you want to be part of the conversation about where cycling's money is heading — not just the watches, all of it — join us on Skool. No six-figure entry fee required.