What drove Nike was hatred for Adidas, reveals one of the founders

One of the founders of Nike has revealed that he was driven to make the company a success by a hatred of Adidas - that has burned for the last 50 years.

Phil Knight said that back in 1967 he developed an "unhealthy contempt" for the rival sportswear giant that he has carried with him ever since.

Back then Knight "despised" Adidas and thought they had the "arrogance of unchallenged dominance" which he set out to destroy.

Knight admits that he was ultra-competitive and drove himself harder when Adidas threatened to sue Nike for copying the name of one of their shoes.

Years later when Rob Strasser, Nike's first in-house lawyer, defected to Adidas Knight called it an "intolerable betrayal" for which he never forgave him.

Such was the ill-feeling that Strasser died without the two having made peace. Adidas and Nike have competed to be the world's biggest sportswear company for decades, but Knight's frank comments show that the enmity goes right to the top.

In his memoir, he tells the story of how Nike's unlikely success surviving numerous near-bankruptcies, lawsuits that threatened to shut it down and a $25-million bill from the US Customs.

Nike began to challenge Adidas in the 1960s and by the end of the decade it was earning $300,000 a year in revenue and beginning to sign celebrity athletes. Yet Adidas was still what Knight called "the biggest monster out there" and his no.1 enemy.

In Shoe Dog: A Memoir By the Creator of Nike, Knight writes that he first had problems with Adidas in 1967.

At that point Nike was not yet born and was known as Blue Ribbon, which imported and sold running shoes for Japanese company Onitsuka.

Knight, 78, and co-founder Bill Bowerman decided that the new name for a shoe they would launch in the US would be The Aztec.

That was, until Adidas threatened to sue because it sounded like the Azteca Gold, their own shoe.

Knight writes bitterly that "nobody had heard of it but that didn't stop Adidas from kicking up a fuss".

He spoke to Bowerman who asked him: "Who was that guy who kicked the s*** out of the Aztecs?"