Omega’s New Winter Olympics Watch Isn’t Even the Most Exciting Thing It’s Doing for the Games

There are exactly 100 days left before the 2026 Winter Olympics take over Milan and the surrounding areas with weeks of snow-covered competitions. And the only people working harder than the athletes right now are the technicians at Omega Timing.

The facility, located in the sleepy village of Corgemont, Switzerland—about an hour’s drive from Bern—doesn’t immediately strike you as the sort of place that would determine world records. Cows graze next to its parking lot, and there’s a foundry that makes cow bells right next door.

But walk through its doors, as Robb Report did in an exclusive tour earlier this year, and you’ll find a team of physicists, software engineers, photographers, videographers, and even AI specialists, all working together to interpret hundreds of thousands of data points at lightning-fast speeds. Their measurements (and the devices they’ve developed to track athletes’ location in real time) determine who’ll take home the gold in sports as diverse as speedskating, luge, and ski jumping.

“We have a role and a responsibility which is not commercial,” says Raynald Aeschlimann, CEO of Omega watches. “Our mission is to make a difference between the first, the second, the third, and the fourth.”

It should be noted here that Omega watches and Omega Timing are, technically, two separate divisions of the Swatch Group, the Swiss behemoth that owns Breguet, Harry Winston, Blancpain, and Longines. Omega Timing (alternately called Swiss Timing) grew from Omega’s presence at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, when the IOC asked the watchmaker to time various events.

“They said, ‘We’ll go to the masters of precision because of their reputation,’” Aeschlimann says, noting that Omega was chosen because its stopwatches were certified as being accurate to one-tenth of a second. The company sent “one time keeper and 30 chronographs.” By the time of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, where Omega certified runner Noah Lyles’s win in the 100-meter dash by a margin of five thousandths of a second, the team required over 600 timekeepers.

“Our devices are measuring up to one millionth of a second, with a maximum deviation of 23 nanoseconds every 24 hours,” says Alain Zobrist, CEO of Omega Timing. “You can’t have any mistakes. Otherwise, you’ll have a wrong result when you judge a photo finish, or you’ll show the wrong content on TV, which billions of viewers will see.”

While the Milano Cortina team will be smaller (there are fewer events to measure at the Winter Olympics), they’re no less well prepared. Zobrist and his team have been working on devices and programs for the 2026 Games since the moment the 2024 Games ended. He’ll deploy 400 full-time staff in and around Milan, including timekeepers, engineers, and cybersecurity experts to ensure no one can hack their nation’s way to a win.

To commemorate the countdown to the event, Omega (the watch company) has released a special edition of its beloved Speedmaster watch, called the Speedmaster Milano Cortina 2026. The $6,800 model embraces the precision that both divisions of the company espouse. Inside its 38 mm polished stainless steel case beats Omega’s self-winding Co-Axial Calibre 3330 movement, which achieves 52 hours of power reserve.

While it’s perhaps not as technologically advanced as Omega Timing’s photo-finish systems, it’s leaps and bounds ahead of the most charming element the company produces for the games. The bell maker near the Corgemont office, Foundry Blondeaux, is Omega Timing’s official partner for the bells Olympic skiers ring at the ends of their races.

“We’ve been working with that little foundry for decades now,” Zobrist says. Asked why he is ultimately responsible for their production, he says simply, “They’re an integrated part of competition management.” One that’s made just as carefully as the clocks at the finish line.