Top Physics at the Startup of the LHC

In 2008, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will provide first proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 14 TeV. The LHC will be a "top factory" since about 8 million top-antitop events will be produced in one year already at low luminosity. After the discovery and first measurements of the top quark at Tevatron, the LHC will open a new opportunity for precision measurements of top quark properties. Prior to data taking, the ATLAS and CMS detectors will have to be commissioned and precisely calibrated. Further improvements will be achieved with first collisions. Due to the large amount of events produced and the clean signal, early top signals will play an important role in commissioning the detectors. Moreover some of the early LHC physics results could come from top physics, leading to a major improvement of top quark understanding and eventually opening a window for physics beyond the Standard Model.