We said we’d do these as the race unfolds, the way we did for the Tour de France Femmes, and here we are. The 2026 Vuelta a España opens today — a 9.4km individual time trial through Monaco, 25 turns packed into it, run partly over the Formula 1 Grand Prix circuit. Riders start at Place du Casino and finish at Port Hercule, on a course that’s gently rolling rather than pan-flat, short enough that most amateurs could ride it in fifteen minutes flat if it weren’t for the small matter of every fifth pedal stroke happening mid-corner.

That’s the whole story of this stage, and it’s a different pacing puzzle than anything else the Vuelta will throw at anyone this month. We wrote about the seven summit finishes that decide this race back in August — long, sustained, honest efforts where FTP is king. Stage 1 isn’t that. It’s short enough that raw power barely gets time to matter, and technical enough that a rider who corners well can beat a rider who’s simply stronger. You don’t own a TT bike. Neither do most of the people reading this. The lesson still transfers.

Quick Verdict: Pacing a Short, Technical Time Trial

Detail	Info
Distance	9.4km, with 25 turns
Elevation	Gently rolling, not flat — no real climbing to speak of
Course	Place du Casino to Port Hercule, partly on the Monaco Grand Prix F1 circuit
What it rewards	Explosive power out of corners and short climbs — not sustained TT wattage
Amateur mistake	Pacing it like a 10-mile time trial effort
Correct approach	Ride it in surges — hard into the corner exit, settle, repeat
Favorite	Tadej Pogačar, in his first Vuelta since 2019

The lesson: A short TT with 25 corners isn’t a power test with obstacles in it. It’s a handling test with a stopwatch attached. Train accordingly.

Why This TT Breaks the Normal Rules

Every time trial we’d normally write about follows the same pacing logic: find your sustainable power, hold it evenly, maybe fade slightly rather than blow up early. That logic assumes the road stays mostly straight. Monaco doesn’t give you that. Twenty-five turns in 9.4 kilometers works out to a direction change roughly every 375 meters — through tunnels along the Rocher, around the 180-degree turnaround on Avenue Princesse Grace, over the Fairmont hairpin that Formula 1 drivers know from qualifying laps every May. Multiple previews of the course have described it as closer to a kart track than a conventional TT course, and that’s not an exaggeration for effect. It’s a fair description of what riders are actually racing.

What that means physiologically is the opposite of a normal TT. A rider on a straight, flat 20km course wants one number, held steady, for as long as they can hold it. A rider on this course needs to brake before every corner, then produce a hard, short burst of power to get back up to speed — and repeat that pattern roughly 25 times in under ten minutes. Domestique Cycling’s stage 1 preview puts it plainly: the corners, hairpins, tunnels, and repeated changes of direction mean bike handling and confidence will be almost as important as pure time trial ability. That’s a fair read of what this course actually asks for.

What Kind of Rider Wins a Course Like This

According to Domestique Cycling’s stage 1 preview, the favorite going in is Tadej Pogačar, making his first Vuelta start since he finished third as a 20-year-old debutant in 2019. He’s become one of the strongest time triallists in the peloton over the past two seasons, and a technical, punchy course like this one suits his explosive style better than a long, flat power test would. Primož Roglič is his biggest rival on paper — four Vuelta titles, tied for the all-time record — but he’s arriving five weeks removed from getting hit by a car in training, without his usual build-up races, and has been open that he doesn’t have the form to defend the title this year. Stefan Küng and Wout van Aert round out the specialist watch list, both strong enough in a straight line to make up time if the corners go their way.

The pattern worth noticing, if you’re training rather than just watching: this course doesn’t reward the purest engine in the field. It rewards the rider who can produce big power in short bursts, brake late and confidently, and get back on the gas without losing the line. That’s a corner-and-power problem, not a pure-aero problem, and it’s the same skill set that decides a crit or a technical local time trial far more than it decides a 40km TT against the watch on an open road.

How Should You Pace a Short, Corner-Heavy Time Trial?

If you’re riding an event with this shape — a short TT, a technical crit, or even a fast group ride with a series of tight corners — the pacing plan comes down to four decisions:

1. Stop thinking in average watts and start thinking in repeatable bursts. A 9-10 minute effort with 25 corners isn’t one sustained number. It’s 25 short accelerations separated by braking zones. Training your ability to hit 120-140% FTP for 10-15 seconds, over and over, matters more here than nailing a steady 95% FTP for the whole distance.
2. Brake before the corner, not in it. Every amateur mistake on a technical course traces back to carrying too much speed into a turn and scrubbing it off mid-corner instead of before. That costs more time than it saves, and it’s a confidence problem as much as a fitness one — the same lesson that applies to descending on tired legs, just compressed into a much shorter, much more frequent pattern.
3. Get the acceleration right, not just the top speed. The riders who lose time on a course like this aren’t slow in a straight line — they’re slow getting back up to speed after every turn. That’s a short, explosive power problem, closer to a track sprint than a TT effort, and it trains differently than sustained threshold work does.
4. Know the course, or ride conservatively where you don’t. Pros will preview this route on the morning of the stage specifically because 25 blind corners at race speed is how riders end up on the ground. If you’re riding an unfamiliar technical course at any level, the first lap is for learning the lines, not setting the time.

A Workout to Train This

You don’t need a closed F1 circuit to practice this pattern. Any route with a series of tight corners — a local crit course, a park loop, even a neighborhood with enough stop signs to force real braking and re-acceleration — teaches the same skill.

Warm-up: 15 minutes progressive, ending with two or three 15-second openers at close to max effort to prime the neuromuscular system for short bursts.

Main set — repeat 15-20 times:

1. 10-15 seconds at 120-140% FTP (RPE 9/10) — simulates the hard acceleration out of a corner.
2. 30-45 seconds at 70-80% FTP (RPE 5-6/10) — simulates settling into the straight before braking for the next one.

Cool-down: 10-15 minutes easy.

Total time: 40-55 minutes, depending on how many reps you build in.

The test: Watch whether your 10-15 second numbers hold steady across all 15-20 reps or fade badly by rep 12. Pros racing today’s stage will see something similar — the ones who paced the early corners conservatively will still be producing real power out of the corners in the final kilometer near Port Hercule. The ones who went too hard on the F1 circuit’s opening sections will be visibly slower on the exits by the finish, even if their overall fitness is identical to the rider who paced it correctly. If you’re chasing crit fitness or you’ve got a technical local TT on your own calendar, this session — done once or twice a week for a few weeks — builds the specific quality a long, steady FTP block never touches.

If your FTP number is more than six or eight weeks old, retest it before you set targets for a session like this. The percentages above only mean something against a number you can trust, and a short, punchy session is exactly the kind of workout a stale threshold turns into either an easy jog or a wasted red-zone effort.

What to Watch For Today

1. Whether Pogačar’s explosive style translates to the tightest sections. He’s excellent in a straight line now too, but the corners are where a technical specialist could actually take real time out of him.
2. How Roglič looks through the tunnels and hairpins. Bike handling on a course like this is at least partly a confidence question, and five weeks without a race after a training crash is exactly the kind of gap that shows up in hesitation before a blind corner, not in raw power.
3. Split times through the first technical zone versus the closing kilometers into Port Hercule. A rider losing time early and clawing it back late paced it wrong. A rider building a gap steadily through all three sectors paced it right.
4. Whether any GC contender loses real time to a mechanical or a missed line, not just to fitness. On a course this technical, a bad corner costs more time than most riders can make up on the climbs in three weeks.

The Bottom Line

A 9.4km time trial sounds like the kind of stage you can skip if you’re not into watching riders go fast in a straight line. This one isn’t that. Twenty-five corners in under ten kilometers turns a pure power test into a handling test with a clock running, and it rewards the rider who can brake late, accelerate hard, and repeat that twenty-five times without the legs going stale on rep 20.

For amateurs, the transferable lesson has nothing to do with TT bikes or aero positions most of us will never own. It’s this: if your event has repeated hard corners, sprint finishes out of roundabouts, or any pattern of brake-then-burst, train that pattern directly. A big FTP number doesn’t automatically show up as speed on a course built like Monaco’s — and it won’t on your local crit course either.

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Course distance from La Vuelta’s official stage 1 page. Turn count and course description from IDLProCycling’s stage 1 preview. Favorites from Domestique Cycling’s stage 1 preview. Training targets are estimates based on power-based training principles — adjust for your own tested FTP and conditions.