Following the Volta a Portugal this year? It opens today with a 6km run through Belém, off at 3pm
The prologue leaves Praça do Império at 3pm and the last rider is expected back around 5pm. RTP carries the race on RTP1 and RTP Play until it finishes in Porto on 16 August.
The Volta a Portugal begins on Wednesday, and it begins gently: six kilometres, an individual time trial, all of it inside Lisbon. Riders are due off from Praça do Império in Belém at 3pm, and the last of them should be back at the same spot by about 5pm.
Six kilometres sounds too short to matter. It is not. This is a bigger prologue than the discipline usually offers, enough for the time-trial riders to bank an advantage over the climbers before the race has properly begun. Anyone who drops twenty seconds this afternoon will spend the next eleven days trying to find them again. There is no climbing at all — the official profile lists zero metres of elevation — so there is nowhere to hide a bad legs day.
Why Lisbon
This is the second time in four years the race has started in the capital, after 2022. Praça do Império makes for a flat, photogenic circuit with the Jerónimos monastery on one side and the river on the other, and it does what a prologue is meant to do: put the race on the map before the roads start to hurt.
From here it is 1,388 kilometres to Porto, taking in the Torre summit, a second time trial at Águeda and a rest day partway through at Santa Maria da Feira.
Where to watch it
RTP holds the rights, showing the stages on RTP1 with live coverage on RTP Play, which is the answer for anyone who is at work at three in the afternoon on a Wednesday in August. The official prologue page carries the roadbook and the mapped route, and it is the first place any timing change shows up when the heat forces the organisers to move a start.
If you are heading down to Belém to watch it in person, the advice is obvious and still worth saying: get there early, pick a corner, bring water.
By Vasco Almada
Image: _morgado / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
