Athlete Giuliano Razzoli spotted wearing a Gerald Charles

Spotted courtside of the alpine circuit, Giuliano Razzoli — Italy's celebrated Olympic slalom champion — appeared wearing one of the rarest complications in independent watchmaking: the Gerald Charles Maestro 97 Tourbillon in 18K white gold. Razzoli, an official Gerald Charles ambassador, wore the watch over his Italian team blue Kappa race suit, a deliberately bold juxtaposition that underscores the brand's positioning at the intersection of sport and haute horlogerie.

The Maestro 97 Tourbillon is built around the house's signature octagonal case, a silhouette that pays direct homage to founder Gerald Genta's enduring obsession with the chamfered octagon — the same formal vocabulary that gave the world the Royal Oak and the Nautilus in the 1970s. In 18K white gold, the case measures approximately 43mm and features a pronounced convexity at 6 o'clock, architecturally carving out a dedicated stage for the one-minute flying tourbillon. The tourbillon bridge itself is hand-finished to replicate the shape of Genta's iconic mustache, a signature detail that transforms a mechanical component into a piece of wearable portraiture. The fully skeletonized dial exposes the manually wound movement in its entirety, with blued steel hands and ruby jewels providing controlled color contrast against the raw architecture of the gear train.

From a collector standpoint, the Maestro 97 Tourbillon occupies rare territory. With only 25 examples produced in this white gold configuration, secondary market availability is essentially theoretical — pieces rarely, if ever, surface at auction or through dealers. The combination of Genta's founding design philosophy, a bespoke in-house tourbillon caliber, and extreme production limits places this watch firmly in the conversation alongside similarly scarce offerings from the likes of Svend Andersen or early De Bethune.

Razzoli's relationship with Gerald Charles is organic rather than transactional — the brand's Swiss-Italian identity aligns naturally with an athlete who competes under the Italian flag while training in the Alps. His slalom gold at Vancouver 2010 remains one of the more dramatic finishes in Olympic ski racing history, and the precision demanded by that discipline mirrors the obsessive finishing evident in every component of the Maestro 97.

At a list price of $165,000, the Gerald Charles Maestro 97 Tourbillon is priced in line with comparable independent maison tourbillons from Richard Mille's entry complications or MB&F's simpler configurations — though the Genta provenance and 25-piece ceiling arguably justify a significant grey-market premium should one ever come to market.