The 30th Omega Olympics: A Special Watch for the Games in Beijing

With just a year left to go before the start of the Olympic Games in Beijing, the Official Timekeeper of the world's most prestigious Games has unveiled its new Omega Seamaster Diver 300M “Beijing 2022” Special Edition.

This will be a special Olympics for Omega, as it'll be the 30th time the company is entrusted with timing how fast top-level athletes cover the distance. The first time the International Olympic Committee decided to let the Swiss brand time the Olympics was at the Los Angeles 1932 Olympic Games. It was also the first time that a private company was allowed to time all the events. There was only one watchmaker and 30 chronometers certified by the Neuchâtel Observatory to time all the competitions.

Omega's "Magic Eye" with the first photoelectric cells and slit photofinish camera was used at the St. Moritz 1948 Winter Olympics, which made a subsequent appearance at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London. Timekeeping technology has been constantly improving ever since, but the wristwatch movement Omega devoted to its connection with sports has generated major interest among watch fans.

For instance, Omega drew inspiration from the stopwatches used at the Montreal and Innsbruck Olympic Games to create the Seamaster Olympic Games collection in 2018 — five watches with details representing the colors of the five Olympic rings.  

The same defining idea was used in the design of this year's novelty, which was also introduced in the Seamaster line — the Omega Seamaster Diver 300M “Beijing 2022” Special Edition. This is a typical dive watch that provides a serious level of water resistance (300 meters), and its blue ceramic dial is laser-engraved with a familiar wave pattern for fans of marine sports.

The Olympic connection has once again been highlighted by playing with the symbolic colors, with the hour markers at 2, 4, 8, 10 and 12 o'clock have been rendered in the colors of the Olympic rings. The watchmakers at Omega who are passionate about precision timekeeping have of course fitted these sports watches with a movement that has Master Chronometer certification, and has passed 8 tests at the Swiss Federal Institute of Metrology (METAS).

Unlike the more popular COSC tests which allow daily losses and gains in terms of accuracy from -4 to +6 seconds, the requirements METAS sets are more demanding: from 0 to +5 seconds. The Omega Caliber 8800 which is open in the regular Diver 300M Co-Axial Master Chronometer Chronograph 42 mm version has been covered with a solid caseback for the Olympic watch, with a stamped Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 emblem.