Austin, TX — Lance Armstrong, once one of the most lauded and loved athletes in the world, recently interviewed former porn star Mia Khalifa about “the perils of making shortsighted decisions.” The interview was made public via Armstrong’s new podcast, “The Forward.”
Per the New York Post’s coverage, the theme of “The Forward” is about “how we fuck up in life — either we fuck up ourselves or life fucks us up — and then we figure out a way to establish a base and move forward.”
The concept of fucking up, be it of one’s own volition, via complex social circumstances or a product of both, is interesting when considering both Armstrong’s and Khalifa’s respective “errors.”
Armstrong won the Tour de France a record seven consecutive times from 1999 to 2005. In 2012, however, he was banned from sanctioned Olympic sports for life as a result of long-term doping offenses. As part of those sanctions, all results going back to August 1998, including his seven Tour de France wins, were voided.
Khalifa is a Lebanese-born social media personality and webcam model. She’s best known, however, for her work as a porn performer. It’s widely stated that Khalifa left porn after three month to pursue other interests, however IAFD documents her work spanning three calendar years and including 27 scene credits, from 2014 to 2016.
Khalifa shot her first scene in October 2014. By December of that same year, she was the top-ranked performer on Pornhub. Khalifa’s work in general seemed to generate controversy, but a video she performed in while wearing a hijab was particularly inflammatory. This certainly contributed to her overall popularity on the internet.
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According to Armstrong, he and Khalifa are kindred spirits — because they carry the burden of “past mistakes.”
“This is why I have a ton of empathy and respect for you,” Armstrong said. “When I open up all these articles about you, every one of them starts ‘porn star.’”
He continued, drawing parallels with his own perpetual shame: “If you put my name in here and Google it and open up 10 articles… every one of those articles starts, ‘disgraced.’”
When considering ways by which one might fuck up, one could argue that Armstrong is the self-induced type of fuck up – he, Lance, fucked up. On the flip side, one might argue that Khalifa was more of a “fucked with by life”-type example.
Young people make rash and/or impulsive decisions all the time. Khalifa’s choice to work in adult entertainment was not illegal or wrong in any way, yet society’s fascination with adult entertainment, rabid consumption of her likeness and overarching hypocritical regard for women who choose sex work certainly landed her in a fucked up situation – one that is more focused on a young person not realizing the judgment associated with specific decisions than it does with actively making an error.
People choose to change career paths all the time. Khalifa’s decision to redirect from adult entertainment to cutting short her role as co-host of the sports talk show “Out Of Bounds” to relocating to Austin, TX to focus on reinventing herself is in no way remarkable. Society, however, allows us to create parallels between her path and the dethroning of an athlete that made a career out of bending the rules.
Image via Ulrik De Wachter.
