Forget The Rolex Daytona, The Only Way To Get This Audemars Piguet Watch Was To Win It In A Ski-Jumping Competition
As famous watches go, you can’t go much bigger than a Rolex Daytona chronograph. Celebrities wear them, there’s a years-long waitlist for a new one, and it’s considered an icon of watchmaking. The toughest Daytona to track down, however, isn’t one formerly worn by Paul Newman or Cristiano Ronaldo, but instead has to be earned.
Originally, the 'Daytona' name was just a way to distinguish the watch as a racing chronograph. But in 1983, Rolex began sponsoring the actual '24 Hours Of Daytona' race at the track of the same name. Besides prize money and a trophy, race winners of all classes began receiving the big Rollie flagship watch as a prize.
Even more interestingly, each piece is engraved by the company with 'winner' on the reverse, ensuring a bit of a difference between a watch won on the track and one merely purchased in a fancy store.
But Rolex was not the first to do something like this.
Most people don’t know it, but one of the rarest Audemars Piguet watches ever created has a similar vibe; it had to be won in a Swiss ski race. To be honest, calling it a 'race' is an understatement; it was a 2-part event that was equal parts Nordic (cross-country) skiing and ski jumping! But first a little more about the watch…
Not unlike Patek Phillipe, Audemars Piguet basically started out in the late 1800s as two high-level watchmakers joining forces to make nice stuff. They never made many watches; in their first 100 years as a company it’s said that only 307 AP chronographs were ever created.
Out of those, only 57 of those chronos were cased in steel. Despite the low production numbers, the design of early APs and their mastery of hard-to-execute watch complications got their company a lot of attention.
In the present day, Audemars Piguet is considered to be part of the 'big three,' or 'holy trinity' of Swiss watch firms; the other two are of course Patek Phillipe and Vacheron Constantin. So any vintage AP chronograph is both rare and fancy; but the model pictured above might be the scarcest of all.
Officially known as reference number 5518, according to AP only nine were ever produced. Interestingly, the first example was executed in all gold, and shipped to a buyer in the United States. The other eight were made in steel, and could not be purchased.
In order to get one, you had to enter the 'Epreuves Internationales de Ski' events in AP’s hometown of Le Brassus, and win the whole thing. As mentioned above, the ski events had two main competitions; a jumping section and a cross-country race.
The watch pictured above is the only one of the nine that’s ever been found.
It was the personal property of Swedish skier Bengt Eriksson, who won the chronograph in 1960. Packing the classic Valjoux-based 13’’’ VZA movement, this watch measures 33.5mm. A kind of 'two-tone' watch, the case is steel but the pushers, crown, hands, and applied markers on the dial are gold.
Mr. Eriksson was of course an accomplished skier; winning the '56 Winter Olympics in Nordic combined as well as a pile of national ski-jumping and racing titles in Sweden. After his death in 2014, this watch was eventually consigned to Bukowskis in Stockholm for sale five years later.
The piece was originally estimated to sell at 180,000 Swedish kroner (about €17,000.) The watch flew past the high estimate at the auction, eventually hammering for 960,000 Swedish kroner or about €95,000.
If you’re related to any 1940s-1960s European ski racers, now might be a good time to check the attic.
