Richard Mille RM 67 02 Wayde Van Niekerk: The Lightest Automatic Watch Richard Mille Has Ever Made

If you have come across a green and yellow Richard Mille online and wondered what exactly you are looking at, you have found the RM 67 02 Wayde van Niekerk. This is not a limited color variant made just to look bold on a shelf. It is one of the most technically extreme watches Richard Mille produces, built for an Olympic sprinter, and it happens to also be one of the lightest automatic watches the brand itself has ever built. In this guide we will walk through the story behind this piece, what makes it genuinely different from a normal luxury sports watch, why finding one for sale is so difficult, and how the buying and selling process works if you are in the UAE.

The Story Behind the RM 67 02

To understand this watch you first need to understand Richard Mille’s approach to athlete partnerships. Since the brand’s founding in 2001, Richard Mille has built its reputation not on tradition but on treating a watch the same way an engineer treats a piece of sports equipment. Instead of signing celebrities to simply wear a watch, the brand builds specific technical partnerships with athletes across tennis, golf, motorsport, and track and field, and designs pieces engineered around what that athlete actually needs on their wrist during competition.

Wayde van Niekerk fits that mold exactly. The South African sprinter became a global name in 2016 when he broke the 400 meter world record at the Rio Olympics, running the race from lane eight, a lane that almost never produces a world record because the runner cannot see the rest of the field. Richard Mille partnered with him shortly after, and the result was the RM 67 02 in his name, a watch built around the same values that define his running, extreme lightness, resistance to shock, and comfort under intense physical stress.

The RM 67 02 itself sits within Richard Mille’s RM67 family, a line that started with the RM 67 01 and was created specifically to be worn during actual sport, not just admired at a dinner table. The Van Niekerk edition takes that concept and wraps it in the colors of the South African flag, using green and yellow Quartz TPT for the case, a material Richard Mille first developed for Rafael Nadal’s RM 27 02 back in 2015.

What Makes This Watch Special

The single most impressive fact about this watch is its weight. The RM 67 02 Wayde van Niekerk weighs just 32 grams including the strap, making it one of the lightest automatic watches Richard Mille has ever produced. To put that in perspective, most luxury automatic watches on the market weigh somewhere between 80 and 150 grams. This watch is roughly a third of that, while still containing a fully mechanical self winding movement. It is worth being precise here, since a small number of independent watchmakers have pushed weight even lower on manual and automatic pieces built with different priorities in mind, so this is best understood as a record within Richard Mille’s own catalog rather than an absolute claim over the entire watch industry. Within the context of a serious sports watch built for actual competition rather than a pure engineering exercise, it remains an exceptional achievement.

That weight comes from the case material. Quartz TPT, sometimes paired here with Carbon TPT, is built by layering extremely thin sheets of parallel filaments at different angles under heat and pressure, similar in concept to how carbon fiber is built for Formula 1 cars, but refined further for watchmaking. The result is a case that is remarkably strong and shock resistant while weighing a fraction of what titanium or steel would weigh at the same dimensions. Every case also comes out with a slightly different wave like grain pattern in the material, so no two pieces look exactly alike.

The case itself measures 47.52mm by 38.70mm and is only 7.80mm thick, Richard Mille’s signature tonneau shape stretched into something closer to a piece of sporting equipment than a traditional watch silhouette. Inside sits the in house Calibre CRMA7, a skeletonized automatic movement built from grade 5 titanium with a variable geometry rotor that adjusts winding efficiency based on the wearer’s activity level, a detail clearly designed with an athlete’s wrist movement in mind rather than someone sitting at a desk.

On the dial, the bridges are hand painted in the green, gold, red, white and blue of the South African flag, visible through the fully open skeletonized construction that lets you see straight through to the movement’s architecture from both the front and the case back. It is a watch designed to be looked into, not just looked at.

Case, Movement and Technical Specifications

Reference: RM 67 02 Wayde van Niekerk
Case material: Quartz TPT in green and yellow, sometimes paired with Carbon TPT
Case dimensions: 47.52mm x 38.70mm x 7.80mm
Total weight: approximately 32 grams including strap
Movement: in house Calibre CRMA7, automatic winding, skeletonized
Rotor: variable geometry rotor in grade 5 titanium
Power reserve: approximately 50 hours
Dial: fully skeletonized with hand painted bridges in South African flag colors
Strap: flexible elastic sport strap for high intensity wear
Crystal: sapphire on both dial side and case back

Every element of this watch was chosen for a reason connected to actual athletic performance rather than tradition, which is a large part of why it stands so far apart from most other watches carrying a similar price tag.

Why This Watch Is So Hard to Find

Richard Mille as a brand already operates on extremely limited production compared to most luxury watchmakers, producing only a few thousand watches across its entire lineup each year. Athlete collaboration pieces like the RM 67 02 Wayde van Niekerk sit even further down that scarcity curve, since they were made in genuinely small numbers tied directly to a specific partnership rather than being part of ongoing standard production.

On top of scarcity, this watch pulls interest from two completely different collector bases at once. Richard Mille collectors want it because of the material engineering and the brand’s track record of strong value retention. Sports memorabilia collectors and South African collectors specifically want it because of the direct connection to Van Niekerk’s Olympic achievement and the national flag design. That dual demand keeps very few examples circulating on the open market at any given time, and when one does appear, it tends to move quickly.

Because Richard Mille boutiques allocate pieces like this to established clients well in advance, the realistic path to owning one today is almost entirely through the pre owned market, where pricing generally runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on condition, box and papers, and how complete the accompanying documentation is.

Buying and Selling Luxury Watches in the UAE

This is exactly the kind of watch we specialize in at Watch Trader UAE. Pieces like the RM 67 02 Wayde van Niekerk rarely show up through ordinary channels, and sourcing one authentically, with full documentation and proper verification, takes the right network and the right relationships.

If you are based in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah or anywhere across the UAE and you are searching for a specific Richard Mille reference, we can help track one down through trusted sources. And if you already own a Richard Mille or any other high end timepiece and are considering selling, we offer fair, transparent valuations and some of the strongest deals available in the UAE market for exactly these kinds of rare, high demand pieces.

Looking to buy a rare Richard Mille in the UAE. Looking to sell one. Either way, get in touch with Watch Trader UAE and let us handle it properly from start to finish.

Please note: Watch Trader UAE has no affiliation, partnership or official association with Richard Mille, Wayde van Niekerk, or any other individual or brand mentioned in this article. We are an independent watch dealer operating in the United Arab Emirates. All brand names, images and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are referenced here for informational purposes only.