‘They were like bombs’: Helenio Herrera’s little white pills kept Inter’s players buzzing

In an extract from his book, Irish Examiner correspondent Richard Fitzpatrick reveals in the early 1960s the grand Italian club was equipped for doping like ‘a small hospital’

16 April 1961 - Turin, Italy - Juventus v Inter suspended - 1960-1961 season - Helenio Herrera on the bench dressed with his iconic cloak.

The quantity of drugs floating around the campus at Inter in the early 1960s meant the club was equipped like “a small hospital”, to borrow an expression used about the doping culture at Juventus in the 1990s. Inter’s coach Helenio Herrera – or “HH”, as he was known in the world of football – used the players on the youth team as “guinea pigs” for his drug experiments, according to Ferruccio Mazzola, who was on the books at Inter’s academy at the time (and a younger brother of Sandro Mazzola, one of the team’s star players).

“I can describe the effects of those white tablets,” he wrote in a confessional memoir. He said he couldn’t sleep after taking HH’s pills. The hallucinations left him like a fish thrown up on the bank of a river. “I was shaking all over. I looked like an epileptic. I was scared. Also, the effect lasted for days and was followed by a sudden, tremendous tiredness.”