Ask anyone why watch brands pour fortunes into show jumping sponsorship and you will get the same answer: rich brands, rich sport, rich audience. It's not wrong. It's just lazy. Money explains why sponsorship is possible. It doesn't explain why it's watches, and not perfume, cars or champagne, whose logos sit above the arena.
The real answer is time. And the horse has been tied to it for two centuries.
The race that invented the stopwatch
In 1821, Nicolas Rieussec, watchmaker to King Louis XVIII, stood on the Champ-de-Mars in Paris with a strange device. Two dials, two drops of ink, one purpose: recording exactly how long a horse took to cross the line. He called it a "seconds chronograph", patented it a year later and, according to the Fondation Haute Horlogerie, claimed an accuracy of a fifth of a second.
For almost two hundred years, Rieussec was credited with inventing the chronograph. Historians have since handed the title to Louis Moinet, whose Compteur de Tierces dates from 1816. But the detail that matters survives the debate: one of the founding moments of the chronograph happened at the races. Before it timed pilots, divers or Formula 1 drivers, the stopwatch timed horses.
Longines followed the same path. In 1878, as the brand's own archives recall, its very first chronograph movement went into a pocket watch built for American racecourses, with a horse and jockey engraved on the back. The brand's equestrian story didn't begin with a marketing plan. It began with its first stopwatch.
Nicolas Rieussec's "seconds chronograph" (1821), the device that timed the horse races on the Champ-de-Mars | Credit: All Rights Reserved
Longines' first chronograph (1878), a pocket watch made for American racecourses, with a horse and jockey engraved on the back | Credit: Longines
In the arena, the watch is the referee
This is where things get interesting. In most sports, a watch logo is decoration. In show jumping, it is the result. A clear round gets you to the jump-off, and in the jump-off, the clock decides. The fastest clear round wins, often by hundredths of a second. The watchmaker isn't standing next to the outcome. It is measuring it. That's the logic behind where watch brands spend their money: tennis, golf, sailing, motor racing, equestrian sport. These are disciplines of precision, where time and control decide everything. Football has the crowds. Show jumping has the clock.
Then there is the audience, which no other sport can offer in quite the same way. The people in the stands at Geneva or Aachen are owners, breeders, collectors and riders' families: an international, wealthy and loyal crowd. And equestrian sport is one of the very few Olympic disciplines where men and women compete head to head, on equal terms. Women entered Olympic dressage in 1952, show jumping in 1956 and eventing in 1964, as the International Olympic Committee records. For a watch brand that sells to both, a sport that doesn't separate them is rare ground.
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Rolex, Longines, Hermès: three reasons to be in the arena
Look at which watch brands sponsor equestrian sports today, and the different strategies become obvious.
Rolex buys the moments that matter. Its equestrian story began in the 1950s with Pat Smythe, its first equestrian ambassador. In 2024, as WatchPro reported, it went further with the Rolex Series, six historic shows from Rome to Dublin, each with a Rolex Grand Prix on Sunday. It owns the stage. It doesn't, however, make an equestrian watch.
Every year, Rolex sponsors CHI Geneva, one of the biggest indoor show jumping events in the world. | Credit: All Rights Reserved
Longines keeps the time. It became the first Top Partner of the FEI, the sport's governing body, in 2013, and it is the title sponsor of the Longines League of Nations. It has also been the title sponsor and official timekeeper of the Global Champions Tour since 2012, a partnership now extended until 2032, according to The Chronicle of the Horse. Unlike Rolex, it is the one that actually counts the seconds.
And then there is Hermès, which isn't a watchmaker and doesn't need to be. The house was born in 1837 as a harness workshop and every March it hosts its own CSI 5* show jumping event, the Saut Hermès, under the glass roof of the Grand Palais in Paris. Watchmakers come to the arena for the clock. Hermès comes for its origins.
Martin Fuchs et Commissar Pezi dans le Prix du Grand Palais | Credit: Christophe Taniere and Léa Crespi
Heritage you can prove
The money is real, but it's the least interesting part of the story. Watches and horses share something no sponsorship contract could invent: a history of measuring what matters, to the fraction of a second.
That's also the test every brand in the arena should pass. Longines passes it easily: its first chronograph was made for the races, and it still times the sport. Hermès passes it differently, through craft rather than time. Rolex has the biggest stage and the best seats, but its relationship with the horse is about prestige, not origin.
Luxury loves to say it's "rooted in heritage". In show jumping, at least, some brands can actually prove it.