Now that it's May that means bike racing season is in full swing, which means countless hours spent in front of the tv watching edited highlights of stuff that happened 12 hours ago on the other side of the planet. This year for some reason OLN isn't showing the weekend stages of the Giro live, which means every single stage I tune in for will have already happened. But it's still more fun to watch than to just read those annoying scrolling updates that you can call up on velonews.com. One thing that I liked about the Giro was that it seemed to be more of a gentleman's race than the Tour, there are actually stages where nobody tries that hard for most of the day, either because it's too hot, or yesterday's stage was too hard or whatever. And it's just as scenic as the Tour, also (unlike the Vuelta, which mostly plays out over the blasted desert-like landscape of Spain). Sure some of the non-Italian big names aren't there, and it takes some doing to keep all the Italians straight, never mind what teams they all belong to. Last year's Giro was kind of a bust in that several of the big names (Simoni, Garzelli, Casagrande) got the boot for one thing or another, such that relative dark horse Paolo Salvodelli won and Tyler Hamilton came in second, broken shoulder and all. If there's one other thing that the Giro does best it's scandals, maybe as a result of having so many Italians in one place, but they even had to cancel a whole stage two years ago after a big police raid looking for drugs. There's always a few contenders who end up heading for home early, proclaiming their innocence. And it was the first of the big tours to have an American team competing, back in the early '80's with Andy Hampsted and his Seven-Eleven teammates (including Bob Roll, who now on OLN has found the niche job of cycling commentator, held by only two other people in the English-speaking world, the legendary Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen, and can hold his own with both of them). The grand tours are like soap operas, you tune in every day to see how people are reacting to what happened yesterday, there's usually something that's happened overnight to catch up with, and then you watch the drama play out over the course of several hours (when it's live anyway), waiting for those unexpected moments when something interesting or memorable happens. You root for your favorite characters (like Cipollini) and boo and hiss at the bad guys (like Pantani). And I like the fact that it's not that widely followed in the US, so you feel like you're part of something different and not just following the herd.