Marta Kostyuk Just Played A US Open Match In A Patek Philippe Aquanaut

The Ukrainian world No. 11 won her opening round in New York with a diamond-set Aquanaut Luce on her wrist. Almost nobody in tennis does this.

Watch spotter @niccoloy clocked it first, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Marta Kostyuk played and won her first-round match at the US Open with a Patek Philippe Aquanaut Luce strapped to her left wrist, blue dial, blue composite strap, diamond bezel and all.

The 11th seed took out Australia’s Storm Hunter 6-4, 6-1 in a bit over an hour. She did it wearing something north of forty grand.

That is the part worth sitting with. Watch brands have been pouring money into tennis for decades and the sponsorship math is enormous, but the players almost universally take the thing off before they walk on court and strap it back on for the trophy photos. Alex de Minaur is a Jaeger-LeCoultre man, and the Reverso stays well off court. Nadal has been the famous exception, competing in Richard Mille tourbillons since 2010, watches built specifically so a man swinging a racquet at that speed would not destroy them. The RM 027 he debuted at Roland Garros came in under 20 grams because that was the only way he would tolerate it.

Every other version of this story involves a watch engineered from the ground up to survive a forehand.

Kostyuk is just wearing her watch.

Here is where it gets interesting for anyone who knows the reference. The Aquanaut Luce 5067A is a 35.6mm steel piece running Patek’s E23-250 S C quartz calibre, which means there is no automatic rotor spinning itself into oblivion every time she loads up a serve and no delicate mechanical escapement absorbing thousands of impacts a match.

Whether that was the reasoning or a happy accident, it is the right watch for the job. A quartz Patek will take a beating that a self-winding one would not enjoy.

Everything else about it is pure jewellery. Forty-six brilliant-cut diamonds ring the bezel, roughly a carat all up, sitting over the embossed grenade-pattern dial that gives the Aquanaut its identity. It is rated to 120 metres, which is more ocean than Flushing Meadows is ever going to throw at it. The 5067A has been discontinued for years, replaced by the larger 38.8mm 5267/200A, so blue-dial diamond-bezel examples are a secondary-market proposition running anywhere from about US$48,000 to US$72,000 depending on variant and condition.

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Kostyuk designs her own on-court gear, which explains why the blue strap lines up with the blue Wilson racquet and the blue trim so precisely. This is a woman who thinks about how she looks walking onto Ashe.

She is coming off the best stretch of her career, a Madrid WTA 1000 title in 2026, a maiden Wimbledon semi-final in July and a career-high ranking to go with it. Her best run in New York remains the fourth round in 2025.

There is something we genuinely like about a player who cannot be bothered with the ritual of taking the watch off. Nadal needed a million-dollar tourbillon engineered by a Swiss lunatic to make it work. Kostyuk just left hers on and went out and won 6-4, 6-1.

The Aquanaut Luce is not a serious sports watch by any technical measure, and Patek would probably prefer nobody see one absorbing that many G-forces. But it is a far better tennis watch than it has any right to be, and she is wearing it constantly and without ceremony.