“If you follow me and support Trump, you can go,” the journalist Jose Been wrote in a now-deleted tweet.

“Bye,” Simmons replied, accompanied by Black hand waving emoji.

In a subsequent reply, another Twitter user suggested Simmons supported Trump. “That’s right,” Simmons wrote, alongside an American flag emoji.

Twitter users took issue with Simmons’s use of a Black hand emoji. In a statement, Trek Segafredo said it had suspended Simmons not for his political views, but for “engaging in conversation on Twitter in a way that we felt was conduct unbefitting a Trek athlete.”