Longines Conquest 1/100th Alpine Skiing

Longines, whose history of sports timekeeping stretches back to 1878, and which has been timing alpine skiing since the trials at Chamonix in 1933, has set for itself a new standard of precision with the Conquest 1/100th Alpine Skiing — the successor to previous Longines watches devoted to sports timing, such as the groundbreaking Chronoson Longines of 1948 and the brand’s first quartz chronograph in 1956.

The movement, Caliber L440, was developed exclusively for Longines by ETA, Longines’s sister company in the Swatch Group. It enables the Longines Conquest 1/100th Alpine Skiing to measure time at multiple intermediaries with an intuitive analog display, which uses a prominent, central red seconds hand to indicate elapsed times to the 1/100th of a second. This function is eminently useful in recording the times of professional skiers, going gate by gate from start to finish line as they glide down a mountain. Caliber L440 incorporates a microcontroller with a flash memory that allows the watch to be reset and instantly and for split times to be recorded.

The Longines Conquest 1/100th Alpine Skiing has a round, stainless steel case, 41 mm in diameter, with a screw-in caseback and screw-down crown protected by a crown guard. The watch is water-resistant to 300 meters and has a sapphire crystal with nonreflective coating. The black dial has an applied Arabic numeral “12” and 11 applied hour indices coated with Super-LumiNova. The central hour and minute hands are rhodium-plated; there is one center-mounted hand for chronograph seconds and an additional central chronograph hand (in red) that displays the time on a 1/100-second scale. Running seconds are on a subdial at 6 o’clock. The subdials at 2 o’clock and 10 o’clock are for the chronograph’s 30-minute counter and 12-hour counter, respectively. The watch comes on a stainless steel bracelet with a triple safety folding clasp and push-piece opening mechanism.