A watch is a difficult thing to advertise on a sportsperson. On the field of play it is usually banned, taped over or simply impractical; in the kit-bound environment of competition there is rarely a wrist free to wear it or a camera angle composed to catch it. Which is why the most valuable real estate in sports horology is not the pitch at all. It is the carpet outside it — the formal, trophy-night occasion where an athlete arrives dressed not as a competitor but as a person of consequence, in tailoring built to frame exactly one accessory.
The 2026 Laureus World Sports Awards, staged in Madrid’s Cibeles Palace in April, made the point with unusual clarity. Carlos Alcaraz, named World Sportsman of the Year, arrived wearing a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona; Aryna Sabalenka was photographed in an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak. The trophies were, in the gentlest sense, almost a sideshow to the wrists — and for the watch industry that inversion is not an accident of the evening. It is increasingly the strategy.
The carpet beats the kit
To understand why awards season has become horology’s preferred runway, it helps to enumerate what the format offers that competition cannot. There are no governing-body restrictions on what may be worn to a gala. The dress code — black tie, formalwear, the deliberate minimalism of an expensive suit — is the ideal setting for a timepiece, which reads as the single permitted flourish on an otherwise restrained silhouette. The photography is guaranteed, controlled and high-resolution; the arrival is slow enough to be captured and shared. And the audience that consumes red-carpet imagery is primed, in a way a match audience is not, to read a wrist as a sentence about status, taste and allegiance.
This is the same insight this publication has traced through tennis and motorsport — that watch visibility increasingly travels with the athlete rather than the tournament. The awards carpet is the purest expression of that shift. It strips away the sport entirely and leaves only the person, the tailoring and the watch — which is to say, only the part the watch industry was ever paying for.
The paid wrist and the collector’s wrist
The more interesting reading of an evening like Laureus, though, is not which watches appeared but why — and here a distinction matters that the industry’s own marketing tends to blur. There are two kinds of wrist on a sporting red carpet, and they signal opposite things.
The first is the paid wrist: the brand ambassador wearing the house that contracts them. When a Rolex testimonee arrives in a Rolex, the watch is doing exactly the job it was hired for; it is advertising, and the value flows along a known commercial channel. The second is the collector’s wrist: the athlete wearing a piece no brand paid them to wear, chosen from a personal collection for reasons of taste rather than contract. The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak occupies this second category more often than the first — a watch whose cachet rests heavily on being chosen rather than supplied, and which therefore signals connoisseurship precisely because it is not, in most cases, an endorsement.
For a brand, the two are not interchangeable, and the collector’s wrist is in some ways the more coveted prize — the unbought endorsement that no media budget can guarantee. It is also the harder one to claim credibly, and the easier one to overclaim. The discipline a serious reader should apply to any red-carpet watch report is simple: assume nothing about a contract from a photograph. Specific watch references and prices reported from event imagery — including the pieces named above — are exactly that, reported, and the line between a personal choice and a paid placement is rarely visible from the carpet.
From one night to a franchise
What makes Laureus worth dwelling on is not the single evening but the calendar it sits within. Watches & Wonders 2026 confirmed a notably sport-heavy ambassador roster — the IWC stand, for instance, drawing figures from across motorsport and winter sport — and the awards-season circuit furnishes a steady supply of the same: formal occasions, framed wrists, guaranteed photography. Taken together these constitute a recurring, ownable editorial beat. “What the champions wore” is not a one-off; it is a franchise — a standing report that can be run at every gala and fair, building over time into something closer to data than gossip.
That is the genuinely strategic point, both for the watch houses and for anyone covering them seriously. A single red carpet is an anecdote. A season of them, recorded with discipline and the paid-versus-chosen distinction enforced, becomes an index — a way of measuring not which brand spent the most, but which brand the people who actually matter chose to wear when no one was paying them to. The trophy, in the end, is for the highlight reel. The watch is for the people keeping count.