Odell Beckham Jr. Brought His Richard Mille to New Unexplored Territory

Someone get Guinness on the horn!

Our cup runneth over with world-beating watches! The wave of watch auctions that started in May and is currently crashing on the shores of June has given us buckets of world records to celebrate.

Take, for example, the below white gold Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar that sold for an impressive $1,155,000 at Christie’s auction house in New York Thursday night. Christie’s justifiably sent out a flare: WORLD RECORD! Of course, the accomplishment came with some qualifiers: it was a world record for that particular Patek reference—3448—and only for “regular production” versions of that specific model (meaning that special editions of the 3448 have sold for more).

At that same auction, Christie’s brought out the banner and bubbly again for a Vacheron Constantin that, in watch parlance, “realized” $356,250. It’s another world record for a Vacheron Constantin reference 4261 made out of gold.

During the May auctions, the title for most expensive vintage Vacheron Constantin sold at auction now belongs to this “Don Pancho repeater.” (Dibs on the band name The Don Pancho Repeaters.) Before this watch came up for auction, the watch was merely myth. No one had physically seen the watch, but a single black-and-white photo of it appeared in the 1992 book L’Univers Vacheron Constantin Genève (The Universe of Vacheron Constantin). The watch resurfaced in a vault and the watch department at Phillips got their hands on it last year. Last month, someone spent $731,268 on it.

That Vacheron is just the tip of the iceberg. Also in May: $968,436 set the bar for a Rolex Moonphase in yellow gold, $588,967 is now the most spent on a specific Rolex Submariner model, the 6200 reference; $494,100 is the new high point for a Rolex Submariner with a “small crown.”

Sure, some of these records require goofy caveats, but they speak to the watch market’s current hockey stick growth. It seems that with every auction there’s reason to celebrate a WORLD RECORD. Pour yourself some champagne.

WE TALKIN’ ABOUT PRACTICE?!

Richard Mille makes highly technical, wacko-looking, and bank-account-draining expensive watches. Remember the $2.5 million watch Jay-Z wore earlier this year? The one with a case that allegedly took 3,000 hours to make? That was a Richard Mille. All those factors only serve to make where RMs are worn that much wilder: Bubba Watson golfs while wearing one and Rafeal Nadal sweeps Roger Federer in his. That’s cool, but golf and tennis are relatively gentle sports. This week, at the Cleveland Browns’ minicamp, Odell Beckham Jr. took a Richard Mille to a place where it’s much more liable to take some damage: the football field. Pictures from practice this week show Beckham going through drills and making his trademark one-handed catches while wearing a $191,500 Richard Mille RM 11-03 McLaren. The band just so happens to come in the same shade of orange used on Cleveland’s uniforms. A coincidence, I’m sure.

Watch auction news, non-world record edition**

Let’s quickly run through some other noteworthy auction results.