Sports and smoking: a clash of values ahead of the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games

While the Games promote health and respect, smoking remains allowed in sports arenas, posing significant health, environmental, and safety risks. Loïc Josseran of ACT-Alliance write about how, despite strict laws against tobacco promotion, the industry continues to exploit the sporting world, creating a false narrative around smoking and athleticism. 

With nearly 16 million tourists expected for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games , France will be a key player on the international sports scene in the coming weeks. This major event must be an opportunity to promote the values of sport, first and foremost those of health and respect.

Tobacco promotes neither health nor respect for human rights, yet smoking is still allowed in sports arenas despite its disastrous consequences for health, the environment and human rights; it also threatens stadium safety with potential fire hazards. 

For many years, the tobacco industry has aimed to associate its products with the world of sport in a positive way: distribution of sports gifts in cigarette packs, promoting tobacco as a performance factor, sponsoring major sporting events, and so on. Although tobacco promotion is now prohibited by law in France (Loi Evin of 1991 and the Framework Convention ratified in 2004), the tobacco giants are still keen to associate themselves with the sporting scene in order to appropriate its values.

One example is motor sports, and Formula 1 in particular. As long-standing partners of this sport, cigarette manufacturers are reinventing their communication strategies to continue promoting their products. A recent study from the American NGO "Stop" revealed that in the fourth season of the highly popular Netflix series Formula 1, each viewer was exposed to over 34 minutes of images showing tobacco-related content. Half of this season's episodes even feature cigarette brands in the very first minute, including Philip Morris International (sponsor of Ferrari) and British American Tobacco (sponsor of McLaren).

Recently, the uneven enforcement of advertising bans on nicotine and tobacco products has paved the way for advertising in of the growing sales of new nicotine and tobacco products, such as e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products. For example, in 2021 Geekvape and French Ligue 1 football team Paris Saint-Germain announced an official partnership “for co-branded products in authorised countries”.

These tobacco industry's links with sport have a real influence on our behaviour and beliefs, fuelling many preconceived ideas on the subject. In its latest national survey, Alliance contre le tabac – ACT found that:

• 66% of smokers and 47% of French people wrongly believe that practising a sport cleans the smoker's lungs.
• While 70% of smokers say they are aware of the danger of smoking a cigarette two hours before or after playing sport, 58% believe it is possible to be both a smoker and a sportsman.
• Almost half of smokers (48%) believe that smoking in small doses has no impact on sporting performance.

These misconceptions are also reinforced by current legislation, which stipulates that smoking is permitted in all open and semi-open sports venues, i.e. in virtually all French sports facilities. Today in France, the law allows sports event organisers to strictly ban smoking from their events, and as sport plays an important role in society, this provides a significant framework for public health strategies.

ACT has been committed to raise public awareness of this issue since 2023. Taking advantage of the Rugby World Cup that year, the organisation launched an awareness campaign entitled “Carton Rouge” (“A red card to the tobacco industry”), aimed at supporters and sports enthusiasts.This campaign explained that it is impossible to reconcile sporting values and the tobacco industry.

ACT is now launching a second campaign denouncing the tobacco industry's practicesto coincide with the Olympic and Paralympic Games, .

Such actions are crucial to mobilise both the public and athletes to oppose and report tobacco industry interference and manipulation of sporting events for their own profit. It is important to engage policymakers to act in order to denormalise the tobacco industry and its harmful practices. We must hold the tobacco industry accountable.

All these issues will be addressed at the UICC 2024 congress during the session ‘Tobacco control and sport: the importance of cross-sector awareness and advocacy campaigns to counter Big Tobacco's marketing tactics’.

The issues of tobacco control and industry interference and marketing tactics feature prominently at the upcoming World Cancer Congress, 17-19 September, which can be attended in person in Geneva or remotely. Consult the programme.