No. 018 · 16 September 2026
Braun × adidas
SU 72, coach's stopwatch, 1972
A tenth-second mechanical stopwatch whose three stripes are the grip, whose only green part is the only thing you press, and whose back tells you what your 400 m laps add up to over 5,000 m.
Announced March 2, 1972 at the ISPO sports fair in Munich, the SU 72 was the first Braun product to carry another company's name. Horst Dassler wanted an adidas stopwatch for the Olympic year and went to Kronberg rather than to a watch house, reasoning that a coach should read a stopwatch the way one reads a Braun receiver: once, without effort. Dieter Rams set the case; Dietrich Lubs, ten years into the department, drew the dial and controls, and later said the dial was where his clocks began.
The team costed a red LED version after seeing a Pulsar and abandoned it inside a week. The segments disappeared in direct sun on a cinder track, and a morning of intervals would have finished the cells before lunch. Instead Hanhart in Gütenbach supplied a hand-wound 36,000 beat lever movement on a 30-second dial, the sweep hand going round twice a minute. Lubs chose a black dial so that one hand in Aicher's light blue could be found at a glance, made the crown pusher green, Braun's colour for the control that matters, and recessed the grey reset so a nervous thumb could not wipe a split.
adidas's part is the half you hold. Around the aluminium bezel sits a light blue rubber bumper in the SL 72 compound, its outer face ribbed like an Adilette footbed and cut with three deep grooves that give a wet thumb purchase and survive a drop onto concrete. The trefoil is moulded into the rubber at 6 o'clock in the same blue, visible only when the light catches it. The white back carries a T 3 grid of dimples and, printed as on the T 1000 lid, a table converting 400 m lap times into 1,500 m and 5,000 m finishing times. Aicher's office asked for one change: the green was moved cooler to match the Olympic signage.
form praised its legibility and queried the price, roughly that of a regie 510's remote control budget. The first batch of about 600 printed the 64-second lap as 13:40 for 5,000 m rather than 13:20; a coach in Mainz wrote to Kronberg, and the table was corrected without announcement. Collectors now check that line before anything else.
