Watch Paparazzi

Athlete Mutaz Essa Barshim spotted wearing Richard Mille

Mutaz Essa Barshim, the Qatari high jump champion who shared Olympic gold at Tokyo 2020 in one of sport's most celebrated moments of sportsmanship, was recently spotted wearing the Richard Mille UP-01 Ferrari — arguably the most technically audacious wristwatch currently in production. For an athlete whose career is defined by defying physical limits, the choice of timepiece could hardly be more fitting.

The Richard Mille UP-01 Ferrari represents the culmination of a joint engineering program between Richard Mille and Scuderia Ferrari, pushed to an extreme that the broader watch industry had not previously achieved. The case measures just 1.75mm in total thickness, constructed from grade 5 titanium and incorporating a movement — the manual-winding Calibre RMUP-01 — that is itself only 1.18mm thick. Every component required entirely new micro-machining processes; conventional watchmaking tolerances were insufficient at this scale. The result displaced the Bulgari Octo Finissimo Ultra from the record it had held as the world's thinnest mechanical watch.

From a collector's standpoint, the UP-01 occupies a category of its own. The 150-piece production run and the €1,700,000 pre-tax list price already place it beyond reach for virtually all buyers, but the technical provenance and the Ferrari partnership give it a dual cultural weight that few references in Richard Mille's catalogue can match. The movement's architecture, visible through the open dial, demands examination under magnification to be fully appreciated — bridges and plates that appear razor-thin to the naked eye are, in engineering terms, operating at the absolute boundary of what titanium alloy can sustain.

Barshim has maintained a long association with Richard Mille, a brand that has strategically aligned itself with elite athletic performance for over two decades. Wearing the UP-01 Ferrari — a watch that pushes material science to its limit — carries a certain biographical logic for a man who has spent his career redefining what the human body can clear at height.

On the secondary market, confirmed transactions for the UP-01 Ferrari remain scarce given the limited allocation and the profile of buyers involved, but estimates from specialist brokers place grey-market values well above the already extraordinary retail figure, underscoring the reference's status as both a horological landmark and a serious collector asset.