Lance Armstrong has been ordered to pay $10 million to SCA Promotions, the sports insurance company that paid his bonus after his 2004 Tour de France victory.
An arbitration panel in Texas ruled against the disgraced cyclist in a 2-1 decision after SCA Promotions sued him for fraud in 2013, USA Today reported.
“We are very pleased with this result,” SCA President Bob Hamman said in a statement. “It is hard to describe how much harm Lance Armstrong’s web of lies caused SCA but this is a good first start towards repairing that damage.”
A statement from SCA Promotions read: “Lance Armstrong was hit with a record-breaking $10m-dollar sanctions award by the arbitration panel hearing his dispute with Dallas-based SCA Promotions, Inc.”
The company said Mr. Armstrong has already indicated he would refuse to pay the $10 million, USA Today reported.
The dispute started in 2004, when Mr. Armstrong sued SCA Promotions for breach of contract after the company withheld his $5 million Tour de France bonus after the first allegations of doping appeared in the book “L.A. Confidentiel,” Cycling News reported.
SCA Promotions settled out of court in 2006 after a two-year arbitration, paying the original $5 million bonus plus $2.5 million in court costs, the website reported.
But in 2012, Mr. Armstrong was banned from cycling for life and stripped of all seven Tour de France titles for doping. When he finally confessed in an interview with Oprah in 2013, SCA Promotions began working to revisit the case. Last February, a judge cleared the way for the company to reopen the lawsuit, Cycling News reported.
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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