I've heard before that elite athletes have higher rates of asthma. Iirc a hypothesised explanation is that asthma in developmental years causes psychological resilience to intense training, thus increasing the chances of reaching advanced levels, especially if the asthma becomes milder over time.

I just did a bit of Googling and found this study of athletes from the 2008 Beijing Olympics: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?journal=Allergy&ti...

Incredibly, nearly 60% of endurance athletes are recorded as being asthmatic. Compared to 5-10% of the general population.

The introduction does corroborate your point:

It has been proposed that asthma among endurance athletes could arise from prolonged mechanical stress of the airway surface and increased ventilation causing airway remodeling. This could indicate that a specific underlying pathomechanism exits, most likely related to endurance sport.