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).