On September 27th, 2001, Filippo Simeoni soloed clear of a breakaway on Stage 18 of the Vuelta a España. As he approached the line (around 2:30 or so in the above video), he took the unusual step of dismounting his bike, holding it aloft, and kissing the top-tube before walking across.
He was fined for this—and this is where we enter the apocrypha so endemic to pretty much everything in professional cycling. Wikipedia, uncited, claims the UCI was involved, and fined him despite the fact that the gesture was somehow a “tribute to the victims” of the 9-11 attacks.
However, the admittedly tiny sliver of primary sources available to me makes no mention of this. VeloNews’ report focuses on breaking the drought of Italian wins at the event. Cyclingnews had a blurb reporting on the fine following day, but attributes it to the race organization, not the UCI, and quotes Simeoni explaining the unorthodox salute: “It's my best-ever win and I thought I'd give the crowd something to remember me by”. No mention of September 11.
Fast-forward to July a few years later. Simeoni has a dust-up with a certain Lance Armstrong over testifying against Michele Ferrari two years earlier. It’s an objectively terrible look for Lance, but if you haven’t learned by now that support for public figures is more tribal than rational, I don’t know what to tell you. But I do know that having counter-narrative, some dimension to Simeoni to make him more than just another of Lance’s Euro-antagonists, would be an extremely useful thing to the growing legion of fans who were sick and tired of the Texan.
And the very next month, as the sort of unfounded opinion you’d expect from such a predominantly old, white, and male fanbase was flying, a letter appeared in Cyclingnews, quoting Simeoni, in an alleged post-race interview from that 2001 Vuelta stage, as saying "The gesture of raising my bike above my head was also meant as a protest against the terrorist's attacks in New York.” In October of that year, Simeoni’s first Wikipedia entry appears, also pushing the 9-11 Tribute.
It spreads as these things do—forum posts, blogs, etc—pretty much anywhere outside the professional cycling press, which would have been extremely reluctant to raise Armstrong’s ire at that time. No matter that the BBC article cited in those forum posts contains nothing even suggesting a Twin Towers remembrance—it’s the line I’d always heard, passed along by Lance haters and long-time Euro cycling fans alike, a badge of knowledge that a deeper sport existed beyond the even-then-cliched prattle of Phil and Paul.
But was it real? Does it make any sense that an Italian rider in a Spanish race would feel compelled to dedicate a win to the victims of a terrorist attack in the US two weeks earlier? Wouldn’t the rider have mentioned this to American journalist Andrew Hood, covering the Vuelta for American publication VeloNews, in his post-race commentary? Wouldn’t he have at least brought it up as justification when fined for the unusual display?
Like so many of cycling’s war stories, it’s almost impossible to know. Truth and fiction have always blended easily in a sport built to craft narratives to sell papers. And as a digitally-based Anglophone, it’s a particular challenge—the only thing I can find even close to a citation for the September 11 tribute comes from Simeoni’s Italian Wikipedia page: page 20 of the 28 September 2001 edition of the defunct Italian paper, L’Unità.
Please let me know if you think your local library might have a copy.
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