Omega's New Speedy Has Us Counting Down the Days Till the Olympics
Today, Omega launches a new, special-edition Speedmaster to kick off its 100-day countdown to the opening ceremony of the 2026 Winter Olympics, taking place in Milan and the Dolomite resort of Cortina D’Ampezzo. It's not surprising that the brand picked the Speedmaster for the Olympics. The watch that pushed the boundaries in space is more than qualified to do double duty for the pinnacle of sporting endeavor on Earth. Omega’s duties in official sports timing at the Olympics in fact predate the space race by decades, and the Speedmaster will always be its preeminent chronograph.
This newest iteration, called the Speedmaster Milano Cortina 2026, features an unusual but subtle textured blue-and-white dial treatment—inspired, suitably, by snow and ice—that’s echoed on the central chronograph seconds hand. A ghostly 26, taken from the Milano Cortina logo, cuts through the pattern. The bezel and baton markings, meanwhile, are navy blue, giving contrast against the bright dial. The full winter Olympic logo, including those famous rings, are engraved on the case back of the 38mm timepiece.
The case back features a "26" logo.
Omega’s long history with the Olympics began almost a century ago in 1932, when it became the official timekeeper of the summer games in Los Angeles, adding the Winter Olympics in Garmisch Partenkirchen, Germany, just four years later. Back then of course, timing was a purely human-meets-mechanical affair, and Omega was already a leading specialist in chronographs. For its L.A. debut, Omega sent a single watchmaker from its Swiss HQ, toting a suitcase packed with 30 high-precision Omega chronometers. While these were then the most accurate weapons in the timing of sport, there was always room for improvement. By the early 1960s, quartz-based timers were the vital direct link between the starting gun and the photo-finish camera.
This move meant developing a whole research and development facility at Omega, which is represented today by Swiss Timing, a lab in the hills above Omega’s HQ in Biel, Switzerland. Shared with Tissot and Longines—two other legendary makers in the Swatch Group, Omega’s parent company—Swiss Timing is wholly dedicated to all sorts of technologies, from the aforementioned photo-finish cameras to touch tabs for swimming races. Across its brands, Swiss Timing gathers official data at a thousand professional and amateur sports events each year.
A closer look at the Speedmaster Milano Cortina 2026.
But the Olympics is the big one, and it’s exclusively Omega’s domain. For Swiss Timing next February, that means 250 tons of timing equipment, high-tech cameras. and computers. Loaded into 15 trucks, these will set out for Milan and Cortina about 10 days prior to the opening day, with the intervening time spent in setting up and rigorously testing it all. Swiss Timing’s technicians are not only responsible for data-gathering and timing events but also for managing seamless integration of that data with worldwide media platforms, uploading the timing and ranking information that appears on our television screens. Not surprisingly, the teams working on the Olympics are not your traditional Omega watchmakers. They come from the fields of physics, electronics, computer programming, and even AI. Everything they create, all that technological research and development, is conceived above all to make the Olympics fair. And it’s all in service of the athlete (to heighten the physical achievement) and the television viewer (to heighten the enjoyment).
For Omega’s President and CEO Raynald Aeschlimann, despite the vast technical gulf between mechanical watchmaking and modern Olympic timing, the Olympics is the best possible showcase for Omega. “The Olympics are the unifying definition of sport, and of course two things are paramount: anti-doping and accurate timing” Aeschlimann says. “Without them, they would not be the monumental inspiration they represent across the globe. Every single Olympic Games represent milestones in sporting history, with new records being set but also new sports coming in. It’s massive. It’s effectively 24 world championships in the same two weeks. It’s such a unique role for us.”
So, while Omega’s approach to watchmaking remains resolutely mechanical, its reputation in electronic timing and all the ingenious gadgetry it brings into play at the Olympics is an indispensable arrow in its quiver.
“For Omega, the Olympics represent a legacy with a close link to mechanical watchmaking” says Aeschlimann. “In our world, having a long history specifically in timekeeping means we represent something consistent—even if the technology has changed immeasurably. In 1932, we were watchmakers; but critically, we were specialists in chronographs. The Olympics would never have called on Omega if were we did not have that expertise in timing accuracy. Now, with all the data we have and the equipment we have developed for the Olympics, it’s very different and very far away from the first chronographs used in 1932. But our role is still there, and, even with the technology, fundamentally the same. We do time, and we do it very well.”
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