American football player Odell Beckham Jr spotted wearing a Richard Mille

Odell Beckham Jr has never been shy about wearing serious horology on the field, but spotting him warm up in a Richard Mille RM 56-02 Tourbillon Sapphire reframes what 'serious' actually means. This is not a watch you wear casually — it is one of the most technically demanding objects ever manufactured for the wrist.

The Richard Mille RM 56-02 is built around a case machined entirely from solid blocks of synthetic sapphire crystal — aluminium oxide grown to extraordinary purity, ranking 9 on the Mohs hardness scale, second only to diamond. The challenge is not sourcing the material; it is working it. Sapphire cannot be cast or forged. It must be milled and ground over approximately 960 continuous hours to shape a single case. Any structural crack means the block is discarded and the process restarts from zero. The sapphire bridges that span the movement require an additional 400 hours of machining on their own. The result is near-total transparency: the manually wound tourbillon movement — calibre RM 56-02, featuring a cable-suspended baseplate to isolate the movement from shock — floats visibly with no metal housing interrupting the view.

The RM 56-02 sits at the absolute apex of the Richard Mille catalogue, not because of diamonds or precious metals, but because of engineering complexity and manufacturing attrition. Production numbers are vanishingly small — typically issued in very limited series — and each piece represents a manufacturing commitment that most brands would consider commercially irrational. The suspended movement architecture, first introduced on the RM 56-01, was refined here to improve shock resistance, making it theoretically more robust than its predecessor despite looking entirely exposed.

Odell Beckham Jr has built one of the more credible watch collections in professional sports, with a consistent focus on Richard Mille — a brand whose athletic partnerships and extreme engineering philosophy align with his public identity. Wearing the RM 56-02 during physical activity is, in its own way, consistent with the watch's design intent: Richard Mille builds pieces meant to be worn, not stored.

On the secondary market, the Richard Mille RM 56-02 Tourbillon Sapphire commands prices that reflect its rarity and the sheer cost of production. Retail pricing, where applicable, has been reported above $2,000,000 USD, and grey-market transactions — when pieces surface at all — frequently exceed that figure significantly. This is a watch that, for most collectors, exists only in auction catalogues.