Montessori stage racing at the Giro today. The bunch decided the Milan Show 100 circuit was too dangerous, so they rolled around town for four hours like a pack of cyclo-tourists before deciding to “race” the last of 10 laps. Mark Cavendish was first across the line, but everyone got a cookie and a hug afterward just the same, including maglia rosa Danilo Di Luca, who coasted across the line some two minutes and change in arrears with the rest of the contenders.

Bor-ring. Graham Watson had time to dig up to dig up Michelangelo and snap a few pix of him sculpting a statue of Di Luca before this snoozer ended, more than an hour behind schedule. The stage took so long, Mario Cipollini’s suit went out of fashion. How slow was it? A guy doing a trackstand actually passed Tyler Farrar at one point. I tell ya, it was slow.

The Associated Press says a certain Tour-winning Texan was behind the rolling protest, and race organizer Angelo Zomegnan was not amused. Said Zomegnan: ”This circuit required explosive bursts. It required riders to get their butts up off the seats of their bikes, and some riders who are not so young anymore apparently don’t feel like doing that anymore. Instead, it seems like their legs became shorter and their tongues longer.”

Weird weather around here lately. Pissed down rain for about 30 seconds yesterday (naturally, I had already watered the lawn), then the waterworks apparently resumed while we slept. Right now it’s partly cloudy and 50-something, but dampish with a chilly wind. If this is May, you can have it. I’m just happy I’m not racing the Iron Horse next weekend. Bring your snowshoes, boys and girls.

Big fun at the Giro today. Levi Leipheimer got into a break with Chris Horner and a few other hard men and they very nearly stole a march on Danilo Di Luca.  The Killer said he wasn’t at all worried, but somebody shit on his saddle. The unpronounceable and unspellable Kanstantsin Sivtsov won the stage, probably because nobody could spread the word that he was off the front. “Sit-soo’s gone away!” “Hah?” “I tell you, Shit-Zu has attacked!” “What’s that y’say?” “Sift-soft has had a go!” “Never heard of him, so I’m not chasing. Piss off.”

The bad news is, Rabobank’s Pedro Horrillo had one of those crashes— straight off a descent, over the guardrail and into a rocky ravine. What isn’t broken is bruised, and he’s apparently in a medically induced coma, damn’ lucky to be alive. Here’s hoping for a complete recovery.

“I love the smell of chamois in the morning. It smells like … victory,” is the mantra of the uneducated cycling fan who thinks Lance Armstrong is the alpha and omega of the sport.

The tifosi can get its cycling news from a wide variety of informed sources, but the average Joe relies upon the mainstream media, which, being lazy, prefer to rely upon a proven, familiar narrative — say, about a cancer survivor who is a seven-time winner of the Tour de France, the only race they know. Some sports reporters have the phrase programmed into a formatting key lest it become lost in their cavernous, vacant brainpans. They draw it like a pistol and blaze away wildly at the wrong targets, then go back to nipping at the office bottle and wishing it was football season.

The New York Times usually serves up better fare, but today the ordinarily reliable Juliet Macur sinks to the level of her less skillful colleagues, devoting exactly 203 words of a 727-word report to describing today’s Giro stage and the remainder to explaining Armstrong’s subpar performance to date and speculating about when he might “pounce.”

C’mon. The dude is 37, riding a grand tour with a few extra kilos, some hardware decorating his collarbone and a distinct shortage of racing mileage. If he weren’t Lance Armstrong he wouldn’t have made the team, but he is, and hats off to him for having the honor to ride the kilometers and take the beating. But if he has a pounce in him I have yet to see the merest breath of a wisp of a hint of it.

So let Big Tex ride his three-week training race and dream about a subsequent renaissance in Frogland, and give some props to the riders who are actually present and accounted for at this event. Let’s read about Levi Leipheimer, Thomas Lövkvist, Danilo Di Luca, Michael Rogers — all the poor sods who don’t have a convenient tagline programmed into some hack’s crumb-encrusted keyboard.

Someone has to ask the ugly chicks to dance, f’chrissakes, especially if they’re the ones busting all the moves.

Whew. Long couple days in the velo-barrel. Sorry about the radio silence, but I had to save my dwindling supply of japes for the paying customers. Trying to wrap up a column for Bicycle Retailer today I looked nearly as grim as Big Tex did going backwards on the Alpi di Suisi.

Clusterfuckery follows this guy like flies trailing a garbage scow. First it was the hoopla over finding a lever to get him into the Gila; now it’s a team-kit change six days into the Giro. The UCI must love seeing his name pop up on the old caller ID.

Big Tex aside, I’ve been having a fine old time watching the Giro online at Universal Sports. It’s amazing how we all demand Enterprise-class flat-panel monitors in the living room for watching dumb-ass sitcoms that rework “The Honeymooners” for the umpteenth time, yet quickly adapt to watching a complicated bike race unfold on a laptop. The video is good, much better than cycling.tv, and it’s free, too. There’s also a pay version, which reminds me of the TourTracker deal the Amgen Tour of California provided, but the gratis model suits me and my budget just fine.

I’ve never followed the Tour of the Gila in person, though I’ve written it up long-distance and edited other people’s on-site coverage. This year sounds like a good one to continue that tradition of maintaining a safe distance, since the UCI seems to have gotten all exercised about the idea of a trio of Astanas — Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer and Chris Horner — toeing the start line at the start Wednesday in Silver City, New Mexico.

What transpired since the UCI nixed their appearance depends upon what you read, whom you believe and whether you trust the translations of what was said. But the long and the short of it seems to be that the promoter pitched a bitch, USA Cycling and the UCI spent a couple of days hunting an out, and hey presto! The ProTour Astana trio is cleared to race — not in Astana duds, but in kit from Mellow Johnny’s, Big Tex’s Austin bike shop.

The Continental Pro boys from BMC, meanwhile — who reportedly trucked the entire road show in, ready to race a full eight-man team — are likewise whittled down to a trio, one that can’t fly the BMC flag. Somehow I doubt they’ll be rocking the MJ kit in solidarity.

It all sounds like so much ice-cold horseshit to me. I’m with m’man Chris Horner, who told my colleagues at VeloNews: “It’s a pro race, you should be allowed to race your bike. If we are skipping ProTour races to do a non-ProTour event, then it makes sense. But you should never, never, never just not allow a rider to race his bike. … Every man should be afforded the right to work.”