In 1993, the Chinese women’s track team shocked the world when its runners set 5 new world records at the Olympic Games in Beijing. The team tested clean for performance-enhancing drugs, but the coach later disclosed that he had given his athletes at least one (entirely legal) performance-enhancing substance: the medicinal mushroom, Cordyceps.
Cordyceps is a rare, high-altitude fungus, and one of the most bizarre entries in the Materia Medica. In the wild, Cordyceps spores float, dormant, until one is lucky enough to land on something fertile, usually a caterpillar. The spore infiltrates and parasitizes the caterpillar, transforming the host tissue to fungal tissue, and eventually killing it. Then the fruiting body (the “above-ground” part of the mushroom) sprouts out of the head like antlers. Hence the names “Caterpillar Fungus” and “Summer Plant, Winter Worm.”
