The stylish sportsmen gracing billboards and glossy magazines with their dapper looks tend to come from a handful of select games. It’s tennis; it’s golf; it’s motorsport or football.
It’s not, to borrow a phrase, cricket. Those white outfits and baggy greens don’t lend themselves to cool. So it’s perhaps surprising that Hublot’s best-looking Big Bang yet was designed by a former star cricketer.
Kevin Pietersen MBE was a batsman on the English Cricket Team between 2005 and 2014. He still holds the record for being the fastest player to cross 2,000 runs in one-day cricket. The Guardian even called him ‘Britain’s greatest batsman’ back in 2012, although his partnership with Hublot actually came about not because of his swashbuckling work on the field but for his conservation efforts.
Last year Kevin founded SORAI – Save Our Rhino Africa India – which supports the various organisations, like rangers, nutritionists and ecologists who everyday work towards saving and caring for rhinos across Africa and Asia. The global initiative is designed to raise public awareness and funds to build up the resources and equipment needed for these rhino conservation activities.
This is where Hublot and its new Big Bang come in. Hublot partnered with Pietersen and SORAI to create the Big Bang Unico Sorai from which a proportion of the money from sales will be directly paid to Care for Wild to help look after orphaned baby rhinos. Part of the money will also go towards the South African National Parks agency to reinforce their nocturnal surveillance capabilities. But more about the watch and why we think it’s the best Big Bang yet.
The 45-mm micro-blasted beige ceramic dial mimics the colours of the African bush with contrasting black pushers and hardware. The skeleton dial is finished in matt beige and features a white rhino at the 9 o’clock position. The movement that powers the piece is Hublot’s self-winding HUB1242 which gives 72 hours of power reserve.
The watch comes with two NATO straps, one in a camouflage style while the other is made of rubber. The camo strap is made with selective technology that produces motifs that are perfectly drawn with an accuracy of a tenth of a millimeter — a first in the watchmaking world, according to Hublot.
Only 100 limited editions of the watch will be created and will set you back US$25,000 (AUD$31,100). Not only is a great looking watch, but one that will go towards saving the rhino, which is at risk of extinction by 2025.