<i>In defence of smoking</i>

Pictured lolling in a swimming pool during his honeymoon in June, Wayne Rooney looked like many young Englishmen abroad: high-street Bermudas, lobster tan, can of fizz, cigarette. This Englishman is, however, the country's most talented footballer, and the cigarette caused a rumpus. Pundits grumbled their disappointment and anticipated the hairdryer treatment from his manager. Other commentators - the smokers, at a guess - came to Rooney's defence. There was little agreement on how the occasional stick might affect his football.
And so many of the finest sportsmen - Johan Cruyff, Diego Maradona, Eddie Merckx, Keke Rosberg, James Hunt, Ian Botham, Shane Warne - have been committed puffers. Bobby Charlton smoked at half-time in the World Cup final; Serge Blanco put away 40 per day while winning two rugby grand slams with France. In the past 18 months, footballer Dimitar Berbatov, tennis player David Ferrer and champion jockey Seb Sanders have all come out (or been outed) as smokers. 'To some extent you can overcome smoking's adverse effects by heavy training,' says Professor Martin Jarvis, a clinical psychologist at UCL who is an expert on smoking. 'The nasty things from tobacco smoke are not going to impact immediately on your capacity to run, jump and so on. They will accumulate over time, though, and creep up one day.' It happened to Cruyff - he smoked constantly as a player and a manager, until a double heart bypass in 1991.
It is in the short term that the effects of cigarettes on athletic performance are harder to assess. 'A sportsperson highly reliant on their fitness would clearly be stupid to smoke,' says Dr Keith Prowse, chairman of the British Lung Foundation. 'But in the short term, smoking won't do much beyond irritate the nose and throat.' According to Jarvis, there might even be - gulp - a benefit. 'Nicotine is a psychomotive stimulant, in the same group of drugs as amphetamines,' he says. 'So a cigarette could potentially enhance performance in "explosive" events like sprinting.'
Hestrie Cloete, the South African athlete who switched from 800m to high jump in order to accommodate her pack-a-day habit, might agree. 'I jump with my legs not my lungs,' she said after winning Olympic silver in 2004, adding that she would smoke between rounds if it were allowed.
In golf, smoking is very much allowed between rounds (and between shots). Players in this year's US Open were even given special exemption from a San Diego bylaw that forbids ciggies at Torrey Pines, part of a smoke-free state park.
Says Jarvis: 'If you're a dependent smoker, you can't manage very well without it. Nicotine withdrawal just isn't very pleasant.' (Ask Shane Warne: even with the inducement of £75,000 to endorse a nicotine chewing gum, he failed to quit in 1999.) So Zinedine Zidane, caught smoking on the eve of the World Cup final in 2006, did so not, says Jarvis, 'because it would set him up for the match, but simply because he wouldn't feel good if he didn't'. Prowse agrees. 'If people are extremely tense, they often say that smoking helps them not to be. Well, people produce their best performances when they're not extremely tense.'
Grounds, perhaps, to cut Rooney some slack. London-based GP and medical journalist Michael Fitzpatrick offers a final appeal. 'Athletic performance relies upon a certain spirit of independence, an individual autonomy to pursue a goal of high physical fitness,' he says. 'Telling people how to live their lives - smoking and diet and everything else - tends to compromise initiative, which is really the essence of sporting achievement.'
In other words: don't fence the man in. If England's most talented footballer is to fulfil his potential, to reach a position where he, too, can smoke on the eve of a World Cup final - he needs the freedom to puff.
Match, Wayne?