Breitling pays tribute to cycling’s The Cannibal with its new Top Time B01 Eddy Merckx timepiece.
Some athletes have a good decade. Eddy Merckx had an era. Between the late 1960s and mid-1970s, the Belgian rider didn’t just win, he broke cycling in half, racking up 525 victories, 11 Grand Tours, 19 Monument classics and three World Championships along the way. Oh, and five Tour de France titles and a record 96 days in the yellow jersey. Fifty years on, nobody has come close. They call him “The Cannibal” for a reason.
Breitling clearly agrees he deserves more than a nickname. The brand has just launched the Top Time B01 Eddy Merckx, a limited-edition chronograph that folds his numbers directly into the watch — literally. Flip it over and the caseback reads “One of 525,” a nod to his win tally, with “Eddy Merckx Tribute” engraved around the open movement. His actual signature sits at 6 o’clock. This isn’t a watch with his name slapped on the dial for marketing points; it’s built around his stats.
It’s also the third chapter in a story Breitling’s been telling for a while. Last year brought the Top Time Coppi and Top Time Bartali, twin editions inspired by cycling’s most famous rivalry. Merckx gets his own watch because, frankly, he was in a category of one — dominant across every terrain and format, with no real rival to pair him against.
The Top Time itself has racing in its DNA. Willy Breitling launched the line in the 1960s as a loud, fast, slightly rebellious answer to the era’s need for speed, and Breitling’s ties to cycling go back even further; the brand built cycling stopwatches in the late 19th century and supplied official race timing equipment in the 1930s. This is a brand that was clocking bike races before most people had heard of the Tour de France.
The design leans hard into that heritage. A yellow dial (yellow jersey, obviously) is set off by the collection’s signature “squircle” subdials, giving it the graphic, slightly retro look of vintage race timing gear rather than a generic sports watch. A tachymeter scale and mushroom-shaped pushers round out the racing cues, while the 41mm case keeps things wearable rather than oversized.
Underneath, it’s running Breitling’s in-house Manufacture Caliber 01, a COSC-certified movement with roughly 70 hours of power reserve, so it’ll outlast a long weekend without needing a wind. Buyers get a choice of a black perforated leather strap with white stitching or a stainless-steel mesh bracelet, either of which nails the modern-vintage brief the Top Time line is known for.
Records get broken. Merckx’s, somehow, hasn’t been — not by Hinault, not by Armstrong (asterisk and all), not by anyone since. A watch was never going to sum that up. But the Top Time B01 Eddy Merckx comes closer than most tributes manage, turning five decades of unbeaten numbers into something you can actually wear.
