Thus the subtitle of this blog posting at PLoS, referencing this article on "Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training". The point being that you can write a review article to argue anything you want, with sufficient cherry-picking and chains of links.
If you are doing actual experiments and making observations or proving theorems, then to a large extent -- larger in some sciences than in others -- you are constrained by the brute facts. But when writing secondary literature, especially in areas where data is generally fuzzier, it is easy, whether deliberately or not, to write to a bottom line, including findings you like and excluding those you don't.
Something to bear in mind when reading or writing any review article.
Amusing, but one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens. We know that nicotine has many performance benefits; to jump from a recommendation to use nicotine - which seems perfectly justified to me! - to a recommendation to smoke tobacco is not a matter of cherrypicking but ignoring what is actually being shown.
For that matter, this seems suspiciously like applause lights, with the implicit argument 'smoking is bad, hence any recommendation to smoke refutes the method or sources used to produce the recommendation'.
Do we actually know that smoking hurts athletic performance on net, or are we just going with the general massive current social prejudice against smoking? After all, gymnasts or ballerinas were notorious for smoking, or so The Simpsons had lead me to believe. And the review's point that elite athletes rarely smoke could just be due to athletes' self-image and the aforementioned social pressures (and their failure to embrace nicotine is not evidence, given that the review spent a good chunk of the intro deriding widespread athletic use of proven-worthless & dangerous methods like altitude training).
If you want to get athletic benefits from nicotine, the obvious solution is to get it from patches or any other source that doesn't crud up your lungs. Smokers have perpetually lowered blood oxygen content, something that would be disadvantageous to nearly any athlete.