Nike fighting subpoenas from Lance Armstrong, feds

The heavyweight legal fight between Lance Armstrong and the federal government is now threatening to drag Nike into the fray.

Both want to grill the sportswear company under oath as a witness to find out more about the company’s previous sponsorship of Armstrong. Both Armstrong and the government recently have issued subpoenas to the company.

But Nike is not going for it. The company is fighting back at both and has asked a federal judge in Oregon for help protecting its information.

“Disclosure of this information could harm Nike’s industry reputation and its relationship with athletes, who expect Nike to maintain the private financial, performance, and related information regarding their relationships with Nike in confidence,” Nike attorney Mary VanderWeele wrote in a declaration to the court.

The subpoenas are part of the federal government’s $100 million civil fraud suit against Armstrong on behalf of the U.S. Postal Service, which sponsored Armstrong’s cycling team from 1998 to 2004. The two sides have been fighting each other recently in their quest for pretrial evidence and faced a deadline in September to cut off such discovery. The government filed suit in 2013.

“At the eleventh hour, Armstrong and the Government have dragged non-party Nike into litigation that has been going on for years and for which Nike can provide essentially no relevant information,” attorneys for Nike stated in a court document filed this week.

Armstrong and Nike once built a marketing kingdom together, with Armstrong appearing in ads for the company, including one in which he mocks those who questioned whether he used performance-enhancing drugs.

“Everybody wants to know what I’m on,” he asked in one ad. “What am I on? I’m on my bike, bustin’ my ass six hours a day. What are you on?”

Nike and all of his other major sponsors then fired him in October 2012, shortly after the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency released a massive file of evidence against that showed he doped throughout his cycling career.

Armstrong is interested in testimony and documents from Nike to boost his defense in the case. He argues that the government’s lawsuit against him is baseless because the USPS suffered no damages and instead profited greatly from the publicity generated by his success at the time.

The government sees it differently. It argues that Armstrong’s cycling team violated its sponsorship contract by doping and concealed those violations to continue receiving more than $30 million in payments – payments it wouldn’t have received if the government had known about what was really going on.

Nike said none of this is relevant to its business.

“Nike is in the business of selling athletic apparel and merchandise, and relies on sponsorship of athletes and product placement as part of its business model,” said a court document submitted by Robert Weaver, an attorney for Nike. “USPS, on the other hand, is in the business of postal delivery services and sponsorship of an athletic team is not part of its core business model. Any comparison between USPS's and Nike's experience related to sponsorship of Armstrong or the USPS is simply not relevant to any claim or defense raised by the parties in the … litigation.”

After years of denials and lawsuits against those who didn’t believe him, Armstrong admitted to extensive doping throughout his cycling career in a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey in January 2013. He has been banned from cycling and stripped of all seven of his victories in the Tour de France.

A judge has set a hearing for the matter in September.

“A response to Armstrong's subpoena would contain organizational, funding, strategic, and other operating information regarding the proprietary business model Nike uses in its sponsorship efforts,” Weaver wrote. “This information is a trade secret because Nike's ability to capitalize on sponsorship agreements with athletes has been a source of tremendous investment over a matter of decades, and is kept highly confidential.”

Follow Brent Schrotenboer on Twitter @Schrotenboer. E-mail: bschrotenb@usatoday.com

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