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Pablo MacDonough, Richard Mille's polo ambassador looked down at his watch, back at me, and simply stated: "Polo is the hardest sport on a watch; more than racing cars, more than tennis or golf, it just is. That's why we gave so much thought to the RM053 watch that Richard designed for me. It is asking a great deal of a mechanical watch, with a finely timed movement, to take the same punishment as the rider and horse." He almost sounded sorry for the watch! Somehow it was not the watch's fault that it had to be subjected to the same brutality as the rider and animal.
[Pablo with the RM030 Saint Tropez Polo Club watch on his wrist].
Polo as a sport might not be the preserve of Kings anymore, but it certainly is the sport of the higher income and the well-healed set! Not necessarily for the equine minded, but it certainly helps. Talk to any polo player for any length of time and the conversation naturally turns to horses, where they are kept, what the frailties and strengths are. There is more to the game than simply sitting on the horse and wielding a mallet. It requires an adeptness of skill, both as a horseman, and with a mallet that has a contact edge of only (approximately) 2cm by 7cm, while galloping along at 30 miles per hour. To get the heights of the sport that Pablo occupies, you have to be both dedicated and talented.
Pablo has been a brand ambassador for Richard Mille since 2011. Initially with the Richard Mille Polo Team, where Pablo was playing with Prince Bahar (among others), Richard came into sponsor the team when he was looking to become involved in the sport. It was sponsoring the team that led to Richard considering taking on a brand ambassador and in that Pablo was the ideal candidate. One of the world's top players, if not the top player (at the time he was rated number one), he is one of the few in the world with a ten goal ranking. So, by January 2012, Pablo Macdonough was announced as a Richard Mille sport ambassador.
Since becoming the Richard Mille ambassador Pablo has now switched teams (to Ellerstina) and spends his year globe trotting with the polo season. The polo season is a perpetual motion following the spring sunshine temperatures. There are three months in the US: February to April; from May to July in the UK; August sees the polo set move to Spain, to Soto Grande); and then the remaining months of the year are spent in Argentina. In his early thirties at the moment (with a decade of top level play already completed) Pablo reckoned that his career would last until he was about forty.
The next thought that occupies the mind is logistics. Polo is not the kind of sport that allows you to sling your equipment in a kit bag and get on the next flight. There is a rather large four legged piece of equipment that is necessary for the sport and which would be hard to fit in any 'kit bag' for a plane. This logistical problem is made worse as each player requires a number of horses per game. For players in Pablo's sphere of ability, it requires that a working stable of horses are maintained in the US, UK, and Argentina, with about eight to ten polo playing horses available in each of the locations. So I asked how many horses he may have to keep, to keep the availability of playing horses maintained. After reflecting for a minute or two, Pablo came up with a staggering total number of horses: (including foals, fillies) of about 400 horses worldwide. Basically having sufficient polo horses to ride around the globe requires a top player to run a horse business to sustain both the income and animals for the game. As Pablo explained: everything depends on the horse. Pablo has his own horses; and the team he plays for guarantees a certain number of horses. The more horses the better chance of winning. Horses get injured all too frequently; polo is a brutal sport. Horses also suffer mentally. Horses have to be brave, but also of a quiet mindset. They can get scared at the slightest thing: the field, a mallet, even a particular colour on a shirt!
Players are rated on a goal scoring scale from zero to ten. Up to six goals the club committee to which the player belongs will decide. After playing in tournaments, and in as high-ranking tournaments as possible, outside adjudicators will decide. The outside adjudicators will see how the player plays and will make recommendations. Pablo's promotion through the goal system was rapid: from seven to eight goals it took two seasons; from eight to nine, another two seasons; and nine to ten a season after that. It is possible to lose the ten goal ranking, but Pablo felt it was more important to win tournaments such as the Argentine Open.
Polo is arguably the first sport to inspire a watch design, and it remains an inspiration for watch manufacturers to this day. The impact resistance a watch has to have in polo, as against the everyday, is considerably more severe. There are several areas of impact that can affect the watch: the ball, the mallet, and the ground!
In describing the RM053 watch that Richard designed specifically for him, and for polo, Pablo described it as: "… a unique brand. All the watches are different. The idea to have such a specific complicated watch such as a tourbillon to play polo, the idea was just unbelievable! You can build a tourbillon watch for tennis, for golf, or for racing, but polo is the worst. I was quite amazed that he was willing to make such a complicated watch for playing polo." For the moment, Pablo plays with the RM010 and RM035 while the RM053 gets looked at.
The one element that Pablo kept returning to was the quality of the watches. The success at testing a variety of watches, and what Richard can learn from the shocks to each of them, have led to Pablo wearing a number of watches for testing on the battlefields that are the polo clubs of the world. There has been an RM010 (Black Knight), a RM035 (with "chronofiable" testing), and currently the RM030 Limited Edition for the St.Tropez Polo Club. Chiefly, for the latter watch, Pablo is subjecting the ATZ white bezel and the RM030 movement to the same beating as he has the other watches.
The RM030 St.Tropez Polo Club watch is the second in the series that Richard has produced for (what Pablo described as) the club that arguably has one of the best competition fields in the world. The first watch produced for the club being an RM011 in the same colour scheme. Not being a fan of chronographs generally, the RM030 is more to my liking. I have found from wearing watches with ATZ bezels to be very comfortable on the wrist. ATZ was the material that Richard started to use for the white watches having tested out a number of esoteric white materials in developing the RM038.
ATZ is more commonly known as alumina toughened zirconia (ATZ) and is a composite ceramic made from tubes of aluminum-oxide powder injected at high pressure. Because of this, the high-pressure injection increases rigidity, reduces the material's porosity, and delivers a scratch resistant material that is second only to diamonds. The comfort of the ATZ bezels with your wrist can also be explained from the fact that the normal use of the material is in medical implants (would you believe!). Hence, it is a rather perfect material for a polo watch. The bezel maintains its colour, is highly resistant to the knocks and impacts that the sport will deliver, and yet will remain comfortable next to the skin on the wrist. Take a look at the watch with a set of polo balls: note how the mallet impacts on the plastic. The watch bezel does not suffer a similar fate.
To my mind the movement also makes more sense. Although the watch movement is the standard (if you can call it that) RM030 automatic, with the clutch operated detachable rotor, the movement makes most sense in use when there is a considerable chance that you might overwind the mainspring given perpetual use. Wielding a mallet back and forth would potentially overwind that mainspring. When both barrels are fully wound, the rotor declutches from the winding system, ensuring they are not overwound. In addition to the 55-hour power reserve indicator on the dial you also get an "On/Off" indicator telling you whether or not the watch is currently being wound. Winding only begins again when the power reserve falls to 40 hours.
Pablo's list of injuries make it sound as if he is a Hollywood stunt man who removed all the safety equipment. He pointed to his right eye: "I have no more bone remaining above this eye. A mallet took it out!" It took five surgeries to repair that area of Pablo's face. Perhaps some ATZ was used in the reconstruction? He did not know! The rest of the injury list would keep an ER in full time employment for a month! His nose has been broken three times, the arm injuries, pulled muscles on the shoulder, Pablo cannot even remember the times he has fallen off. The last bad one was at the Argentine Open semi-final 2013.
As the interview was drawing to a close, and to prove his point, Pablo picked up his mobile phone. "Here, let me show you!" he said. Scrolling through the photos on his phone, he stopped, clicked on one of them and handed the phone to me. Sure enough, there was the photo, rider and horse in perfect dis-harmony, Pablo airborne, horse airborne for that matter, and the element taking the first impact was the (you guessed it) - the watch. The RM010 Black Knight for those who are interested. "Did you get up and finish the match?" A wry smile from Pablo: "Yes! Of course! I was lucky on that occasion. I won too! And the watch survived!"
This message has been edited by AnthonyTsai on 2014-07-15 06:52:41 This message has been edited by 219 on 2014-07-18 00:17:55 This message has been edited by 219 on 2014-07-18 00:19:05 This message has been edited by AnthonyTsai on 2014-08-28 17:14:41
Polo, Pablo MacDonough and the Richard Mille St. Tropez Polo Club Limited Edition RM030
Pablo MacDonough, Richard Mille's polo ambassador looked down at his watch, back at me, and simply stated: "Polo is the hardest sport on a watch; more than racing cars, more than tennis or golf, it just is. That's why we gave so much thought to the RM053 watch that Richard designed for me. It is asking a great deal of a mechanical watch, with a finely timed movement, to take the same punishment as the rider and horse." He almost sounded sorry for the watch! Somehow it was not the watch's fault that it had to be subjected to the same brutality as the rider and animal.
The punishment metered out during a polo match is not the usual G-force and constant pressure that comes with racing and subjecting watch and driver to lateral forces around the turn. No, the punishment that a polo player subjects a watch to is more of the physical kind: the impact hits that come from mallet, ball, or even with the ground!
Polo as a sport might not be the preserve of Kings anymore, but it certainly is the sport of the higher income and the well-healed set! Not necessarily for the equine minded, but it certainly helps. Talk to any polo player for any length of time and the conversation naturally turns to horses, where they are kept, what the frailties and strengths are. There is more to the game than simply sitting on the horse and wielding a mallet. It requires an adeptness of skill, both as a horseman, and with a mallet that has a contact edge of only (approximately) 2cm by 7cm, while galloping along at 30 miles per hour. To get the heights of the sport that Pablo occupies, you have to be both dedicated and talented.
Pablo has been a brand ambassador for Richard Mille since 2011. Initially with the Richard Mille Polo Team, where Pablo was playing with Prince Bahar (among others), Richard came into sponsor the team when he was looking to become involved in the sport. It was sponsoring the team that led to Richard considering taking on a brand ambassador and in that Pablo was the ideal candidate. One of the world's top players, if not the top player (at the time he was rated number one), he is one of the few in the world with a ten goal ranking. So, by January 2012, Pablo Macdonough was announced as a Richard Mille sport ambassador.
Since becoming the Richard Mille ambassador Pablo has now switched teams (to Ellerstina) and spends his year globe trotting with the polo season. The polo season is a perpetual motion following the spring sunshine temperatures. There are three months in the US: February to April; from May to July in the UK; August sees the polo set move to Spain, to Soto Grande); and then the remaining months of the year are spent in Argentina. In his early thirties at the moment (with a decade of top level play already completed) Pablo reckoned that his career would last until he was about forty.
The next thought that occupies the mind is logistics. Polo is not the kind of sport that allows you to sling your equipment in a kit bag and get on the next flight. There is a rather large four legged piece of equipment that is necessary for the sport and which would be hard to fit in any 'kit bag' for a plane. This logistical problem is made worse as each player requires a number of horses per game. For players in Pablo's sphere of ability, it requires that a working stable of horses are maintained in the US, UK, and Argentina, with about eight to ten polo playing horses available in each of the locations. So I asked how many horses he may have to keep, to keep the availability of playing horses maintained. After reflecting for a minute or two, Pablo came up with a staggering total number of horses: (including foals, fillies) of about 400 horses worldwide. Basically having sufficient polo horses to ride around the globe requires a top player to run a horse business to sustain both the income and animals for the game. As Pablo explained: everything depends on the horse. Pablo has his own horses; and the team he plays for guarantees a certain number of horses. The more horses the better chance of winning. Horses get injured all too frequently; polo is a brutal sport. Horses also suffer mentally. Horses have to be brave, but also of a quiet mindset. They can get scared at the slightest thing: the field, a mallet, even a particular colour on a shirt!
Players are rated on a goal scoring scale from zero to ten. Up to six goals the club committee to which the player belongs will decide. After playing in tournaments, and in as high-ranking tournaments as possible, outside adjudicators will decide. The outside adjudicators will see how the player plays and will make recommendations. Pablo's promotion through the goal system was rapid: from seven to eight goals it took two seasons; from eight to nine, another two seasons; and nine to ten a season after that. It is possible to lose the ten goal ranking, but Pablo felt it was more important to win tournaments such as the Argentine Open.
Polo is arguably the first sport to inspire a watch design, and it remains an inspiration for watch manufacturers to this day. The impact resistance a watch has to have in polo, as against the everyday, is considerably more severe. There are several areas of impact that can affect the watch: the ball, the mallet, and the ground!
In describing the RM053 watch that Richard designed specifically for him, and for polo, Pablo described it as: "… a unique brand. All the watches are different. The idea to have such a specific complicated watch such as a tourbillon to play polo, the idea was just unbelievable! You can build a tourbillon watch for tennis, for golf, or for racing, but polo is the worst. I was quite amazed that he was willing to make such a complicated watch for playing polo." For the moment, Pablo plays with the RM010 and RM035 while the RM053 gets looked at.
The one element that Pablo kept returning to was the quality of the watches. The success at testing a variety of watches, and what Richard can learn from the shocks to each of them, have led to Pablo wearing a number of watches for testing on the battlefields that are the polo clubs of the world. There has been an RM010 (Black Knight), a RM035 (with "chronofiable" testing), and currently the RM030 Limited Edition for the St.Tropez Polo Club. Chiefly, for the latter watch, Pablo is subjecting the ATZ white bezel and the RM030 movement to the same beating as he has the other watches.
The RM030 St.Tropez Polo Club watch is the second in the series that Richard has produced for (what Pablo described as) the club that arguably has one of the best competition fields in the world. The first watch produced for the club being an RM011 in the same colour scheme. Not being a fan of chronographs generally, the RM030 is more to my liking. I have found from wearing watches with ATZ bezels to be very comfortable on the wrist. ATZ was the material that Richard started to use for the white watches having tested out a number of esoteric white materials in developing the RM038.
ATZ is more commonly known as alumina toughened zirconia (ATZ) and is a composite ceramic made from tubes of aluminum-oxide powder injected at high pressure. Because of this, the high-pressure injection increases rigidity, reduces the material's porosity, and delivers a scratch resistant material that is second only to diamonds. The comfort of the ATZ bezels with your wrist can also be explained from the fact that the normal use of the material is in medical implants (would you believe!). Hence, it is a rather perfect material for a polo watch. The bezel maintains its colour, is highly resistant to the knocks and impacts that the sport will deliver, and yet will remain comfortable next to the skin on the wrist. Take a look at the watch with a set of polo balls: note how the mallet impacts on the plastic. The watch bezel does not suffer a similar fate.
To my mind the movement also makes more sense. Although the watch movement is the standard (if you can call it that) RM030 automatic, with the clutch operated detachable rotor, the movement makes most sense in use when there is a considerable chance that you might overwind the mainspring given perpetual use. Wielding a mallet back and forth would potentially overwind that mainspring. When both barrels are fully wound, the rotor declutches from the winding system, ensuring they are not overwound. In addition to the 55-hour power reserve indicator on the dial you also get an "On/Off" indicator telling you whether or not the watch is currently being wound. Winding only begins again when the power reserve falls to 40 hours.
Pablo's list of injuries make it sound as if he is a Hollywood stunt man who removed all the safety equipment. He pointed to his right eye: "I have no more bone remaining above this eye. A mallet took it out!" It took five surgeries to repair that area of Pablo's face. Perhaps some ATZ was used in the reconstruction? He did not know! The rest of the injury list would keep an ER in full time employment for a month! His nose has been broken three times, the arm injuries, pulled muscles on the shoulder, Pablo cannot even remember the times he has fallen off. The last bad one was at the Argentine Open semi-final 2013.
As the interview was drawing to a close, and to prove his point, Pablo picked up his mobile phone. "Here, let me show you!" he said. Scrolling through the photos on his phone, he stopped, clicked on one of them and handed the phone to me. Sure enough, there was the photo, rider and horse in perfect dis-harmony, Pablo airborne, horse airborne for that matter, and the element taking the first impact was the (you guessed it) - the watch. The RM010 Black Knight for those who are interested. "Did you get up and finish the match?" A wry smile from Pablo: "Yes! Of course! I was lucky on that occasion. I won too! And the watch survived!"
Andrew H
Epilogue: for those of you who want to see the picture I was looking at on Pablo's phone and the full effect of the fall on the watch: a series of photos from the Argentine Open 2013:
Wow a smashing beautiful write-up Andrew!!
I loved the insights Pablo gave us about the polo sport. I makes me appreciate this sport much more. Now I know why this sport is generally for the more affluent - imagine the cost of maintaining these horses! And since you really can't transport them around the world from event to event, you need to have a selection of horses across the globe.
I don't know if you know the answer to this question, but if I got an ink marker and drew a line on the ATZ ceramic bezel, is the ceramic porous enough where it would absorb some of the ink marker or would I be able to wipe it off with no ink absorbing into the ceramic?
Cheers,
Anthony
Not sure of the answer to your question either....
my base response, without any scientific justification, is that you can treat the ATZ material like steel. Get a 'Sharpe' marker and the mark will be there even if you try and wash it off with soap and water. Can it be polished out? I would imagine so. In other words, the porosity of the material is low meaning that any mark does not move far below the surface and remains superficial.
Andrew H
one of...
...the most interesting review of the last times!
oh how much I enjoyed reading!
Thank you Andrew, and thanks Richard for another outstanding piece!
best regards, Chris
very interesting write-up
and excellent pictures. thank you for sharing this wonderful report and pictures!
Great photos and text, excellent read. Thanks! Tell us more about ATZ... [nt]
No message body
Thanks Thomas - at some point I should do a greater in-depth
article into ATZ, but a great deal of it can be found on the web. Material science journals are full of articles about new medical applications for the material.
Thanks for reading and good to see you here.
Andrew H
Held an unreasonable prejudice against polo . . .
. . . ever since finishing last in a donkey race back in grade school, compounded by a series on the Mickey Mouse Club revolving around a snotty polo-playing kid, Kurt Russell, and adolescent America's sweetheart, Annette Funicello. One bad experience plus distasteful screen imagery, and you couldn't get me to pay an ounce of attention to anything equine. Until, that is, just now. Great write-up, Andrew - the utter savagery of polo came thru. And Pablo's right: there can't be an activity more dangerous for a mechanical watch than polo, except maybe rodeo.
Once again, Richard has identified a fitting allegory that defines the essence of watchmaking.
Art
PS - perhaps an edition tailored for pool players next?
Thanks Art! That is a checkered past you have there! Ever find out
what happened to that Kurt Russell kid? Haven't seen him on the polo circuit, so chances are you had the last laugh! 
Thanks for reading.
Andrew H
A purpose-made watch....
......yep, not only does the watch fit the bill in terms of being built for purpose, it has that genuinely robust sporty look that works too. Even the case back had me fascinated.
Great article about polo and the RM030.
Thanks! Richard Mille watches have always been genuinely robust...
Richard's "press party trick" at the beginning was to throw the watch (the RM001 or RM002) across the room on his way in to demonstrate the impact resistance and durability. Nothing has changed in that regard.
Andrew H
Nice report on the RM030
Great to see the RM in action, and very cool to know that the RM10 on Pablo's wrist survived that fall off the horse.
Regards,
ED-209
Insightful.
Never knew that so many horses were required for the sport.
Also, never knew that the horses suffered so many problems. That last photo is amazing and chilling at the same time.
This polo watch is distinctive and very white. Easy to see. I'd be really concerned about grass stains on the watch after a fall or contact with the ground. As the polo balls have similar grass stains from rolling on the ground all day. The material ATZ is surely another interesting watch material that we will be seeing not only on the battlefield, but with some luck perhaps in surgery as well.
Looking forward to meeting the watch!
Thanks for the information!
I think the grass stains would be the least of your worries! And the
ATZ is resistant to stains from grass. That could be easily brushed away.
Andrew H
Good to know!
All my qualms are defeated.
Now all I have to do is sell the house, the kids to medical experiments, and raid the retirement fund. Wait a minute, I don't have those to raid.
Bittersweet
As happy as i am to get confirmation that the rm 10 and 35 holds up well to this rigorous sport, and they should, given that they're sport watches, I'm a little sad to hear that the 53 is mostly looked at.
It wants to be worn and played!
It wants to be worn and played!