I suppose you are unlikely to see anyone here back me up since HackerNews isn't exactly an athletic demographic.
Fever, red eyes, overflowing mucus, extreme soreness and raw throat for days or over a week - are you trying to tell me that this isn't sick? Maybe that's your normal state, but I've seen hundreds of cases of amateur and professional athletes reduced to this shortly after performing national caliber efforts.
One might think oneself able to safely make unfounded assertions due to the rest of HN being overweight nerds coding away in their basements. OTOH, one might be surprised to find out how many former Cat 1 bike racers and formerly national-class 5K runners frequent HN. And they're not backing you up because their anecdotal evidence says otherwise.
I'm saying (and so is this study) that these symptoms are not necessarily due to infection. You strain your body to an incredible degree when racing, so it's perfectly plausible to me that these symptoms are just the body recovering from the strain rather than fighting infection.
> Their first conclusion was that athletes are lousy at identifying whether and why they are sniffling. The original 1980s studies had relied on runners’ self-reports of illness. But newer experiments that actually tested saliva showed that less than a third of marathon runners who thought they had caught a cold actually had. Statistically, their odds of becoming sick were about the same as for anyone else in the race’s host city.