Alpe d'Huez said:
I've seen this several times. Every time it's just despicable.
I always wondered if it were someone not so passive as Simeoni, but someone with a more, shall we say "blunt" personality, what they would have done?
This was written in Bicycling magazine at the time & sums up the entire saga well:
Armstrong's comment that other riders supported him is ugly as well. For one, it underlines that cycling still has an omerta, or a code of silence. While the rider's union might be a laughable one from the standpoint of labor relations with team management or the UCI, it clearly enforces rigid conformist behavior among its own. Simeoni's ostracization is just another sad chapter in a book that includes sections on Jesus Manzano, Christophe Bassons, Jerome Chiotti, Paul Kimmage and any other pro cyclist who has the temerity to say publicly that not only did he dope, but others do too, even if no names are used.
Simeoni will very likely not be a professional cyclist next year. He has, after all, bit the hand that fed him, ****ed off the world's most powerful cyclist and appears to have few allies in his court. Perhaps he can get a ride with Amore e Vita, the controversial Italian team which is known for throwing last-chance contracts at reformed dopers (last week, they offered just such a gig to David Millar, who was sacked by his Cofidis team).
Bike racing will probably always have doping of some kind, and there will be many riders, even clean ones, who want to protect their earning power ignoring its problems, saying "we do more than anyone to combat doping," and so on.
But this issue speaks to something else besides the sport's unhealthy little addiction; it speaks to Armstrong. What does it take for this man to be satisfied? And how are we, fans of the sport, to reconcile two utterly adverse sides of a champion? How can a man who has stared death in the face, who knows the value of his own wonderful life and has shown such remarkable, limitless and genuine compassion to his fellow cancer survivors, be so needlessly petty? From here, it looks like hate, pure and simple.
Armstrong now has six Tours, $16 million plus a year, Sheryl freaking Crow, his incredible benefit to the sport and to the cancer community and the adoration of millions of fans. Is that success so insubstantial that he must go out of his way to make someone else fail?
It's a sad epitaph to what should have been a perfect Tour for Armstrong, one where his dominant performance and sublime form confirmed him as the best racer of his era, and one of the best of all time.
I wrote weeks ago that Lance Armstrong had two sides--the public Armstrong you see on television and in his books, and a colder, spiteful one that is largely private. I wrote that if Armstrong lost this Tour de France that we might see that the private one was more his true self.
http://www.bicycling.com/news/pro-cycling/armstrong-hunts-down-rider