Not only in the Olympic Village, but for the first time, the entire arena will be tobacco and tobacco advertisement free.

This is the latest development in a trend of sporting events bucking the lucrative product sponsorship of the tobacco industry, in order to better support the healthier lifestyle embodied by most of their athletes.

While most tobacco companies argue that the athletic events that they endorse is money spent on charity, there are certainly benefits to having the company logo prominently displayed at the events, and even wore by athletes. The psychological link viewers and fans make between the sport: sleek, and fast, and the cigarettes has been well documented. For example after an Indian affiliate of the British American Tobacco group sponsored the World Cup Cricket in India in 1996, a survey showed that smoking among Indian teens increased five-fold.

While advertising for tobacco products is banned on American TV, the industry's sponsoring of sporting events gains it an estimate $150 million worth of television advertising a year, their logos flashing across American TV screens from the hats, bill boards, and even corporate thanks you clips run throughout the televised event. Not a bad deal since in 1999 tobacco companies only spent $113.6 million on the actual sponsoring of sporting events, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

While teens are still the largest growing group of smokers in America, increasingly it is the developing world that is most threatened by the tobacco industry. A recent survey showed that out of five heavy smoking countries, Argentina, India, Japan, Nigeria, and Russia, an overall average of 87 percent of people, both smoking and non, approve of international efforts to create a set of rules and regulations that would reduce tobacco use.

"People from these high tobacco-consuming countries are demanding strong measures to protect them and their families from the dangers of tobacco," said Dr. Derek Yach, Executive Director of Noncommunicable Diseases at the World Health Organization (WHO).

In fact the WHO has laid out a set of goals to fight the spread of smoking, which it considers a disease communicated through advertising, called the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). This convention calls for a ban on tobacco advertising at athletic events, or any other events popular with the younger generations. The tobacco industry has counter-offered the "International Tobacco Marketing Standards," which is a voluntary program to target only adult smokers.

Whether or not tobacco companies want to advertise at the Winter Olympics, or even the upcoming World Cup (Soccer) that will be held in South Korea and Japan next year, they will not be able to. Both organizations have become tobacco free this year. While many sports fans can still light up in outdoor stadiums in the developed world (and some cricket fans may want to watch the game on TV rather than give up their Churchill cigars), the trend, as with these prestigious international events, is to sever the link between tobacco and sports.