Sports

Armstrong’s lawsuit defense: Postal Service should have known I was cheating

Duh.

That’s the argument Lance Armstrong is using to defend himself in a $120 million federal lawsuit accusing him, and others, of defrauding his former team’s sponsor, the U.S. Postal Service.

Armstrong was stripped of seven Tour de France titles last year amid allegations of doping and in January he admitted that he was indeed using performance-enhancing drugs to win races. In a 25-page rebuttal to the suit, Armstrong is saying the Postal Service should have known he was doping all along because rumors of his PED use had gotten loads of news coverage, according to the Wall Street Journal. But officials “did nothing.”

The Postal Service began its sponsorship of Armstrong’s team in 1995 and extended it through 2004.

“Instead, the Postal Service renewed the Sponsorship Agreement,” Armstrong’s lawyers, John Keker and Elliot Peters of Keker & Van Nest, LLP, wrote, adding that it also “basked in the favorable publicity of its sponsorship.”

The attorneys also explained the benefits the Postal Service got from the team, including access to a private hospitality tent on the Champs Elysees, a famous avenue in Paris, and team receptions that included exclusive dinners.

The lawsuit was filed in 2010 by Floyd Landis, a former teammate of Armstrong. It alleges that Armstrong and others on the team defrauded the government when they took sponsorship dollars from the Postal Service with the understanding that no one on the squad would use performance-enhancing drugs.

Landis stands to make as much as one-third of any money recovered, per federal law, as a citizen suing for alleged fraud against the government.