EDITORIAL

Tobacco in sport

Tobacco in sport: an endless addiction?

A Blum

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor Alan Blum
The Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society, The University of Alabama School of Medicine, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35401, USA; ablum@cchs.ua.edu

---

"They don’t get your wind..."

---

Abbreviations: DOC, Doctors Ought to Care; MSA, Master Settlement Agreement; NASCAR, National Association of Stock Car Racing; NSTEP, National Spit Tobacco Education Program; USST, United States Smokeless Tobacco Company

Keywords: sponsorship; sport; oral tobacco

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Nearly all in tobacco control today can only imagine the early days of television, when young sports fans watching their favourite team would be exposed to a steady stream of cigarette commercials featuring testimonials by top athletes. In the USA, overt cigarette advertisements have long since gone from the airwaves. Yet Formula One car racing, which reaches over 40 billion TV viewers each year, retains several tobacco sponsors whose brand logotypes and colours are constantly in view on the racing cars, banners, and drivers’ uniforms. And although 1984 marked the last Olympic Games to have an official cigarette sponsor, in October China’s largest cigarette company, Baisha, signed a 21 year old Olympic gold medallist hurdler to endorse a leading cigarette brand in print ads and commercials. "Everyone likes Liu Xiang and hopes he will soar higher and faster and maintain his sunny, healthy, progressive image," boasted the company’s president.¹

The connection between sports and tobacco is as old as professional athletic competition itself. Just a few years after . . . [Full text of this article]

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

• Vidar Hanstad, D., Waddington, I. (2009). Sport, health and drugs: a critical re-examination of some key issues and problems. The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health 129: 174-182 [Abstract]  
• Hafez, N., Ling, P. M (2006). Finding the Kool Mixx: how Brown & Williamson used music marketing to sell cigarettes.. Tobacco Control 15: 359-366 [Abstract] [Full Text]