It’s all about Project Bolt!

DWAIN CHAMBERS has confessed he is still working with infamous nutritionist Victor Conte — the man who supplied the drugs that cost him a two-year worldwide ban.They are involved in a high-altitude training regime that appears to deliver even better results than the drugs sprinter Chambers was caught cheating with in 2003.Last week Chambers, 30, ran 6.42sec — the third-fastest 60 metres time in history — in the semi-finals of the European Indoor Championships in Turin. Then he landed gold in the final. But his continued relationship with Conte, founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative in California, and refusal to abandon former trainer Remi Korchemny, convicted in the BALCO investigation, is sure to raise eyebrows.Conte spent four months in jail and four under house arrest after Chambers’ drugs bust. But both insist their new bid to improve the English runner’s times by hundredths of a second is totally legal.Chambers is believed to be the first elite sprinter to try a technology called intermittent hypoxic training — alternately breathing low and high-oxygen air for several minutes. He said: “This allows me to have a deeper training load. I suffer less lactic acid, delivering more oxygen to my muscles.
“It’s a shame we didn’t know this five years ago.
“The relationship with Victor really never went sour.
“I am totally drug-free. I’ve forgiven him, he’s forgiven me.
“I don’t blame him for anything that occurred. I ruined my career, nobody else did. My relationship with him now is on an educational basis. The information they require from me about when to test, I ask Victor for that and give it to the relevant bodies.” Conte said: “The last time I gave any athlete performance-enhancing drugs was in August of 2003. My days of wrong-doing ended the day of the BALCO raid. Now Dwain is absolutely blazing a new trail.
“Everyone thought simulated altitude training was all about endurance athletes. No one thought of applying this to explosive sprinting.”
For three days, Chambers breathes air thinned to 10,000 feet for five minutes and then rests for about an hour. Over the coming days of a two-week spell, the oxygen is thinned to 12,500ft, 15,000ft and finally 20,000ft. In his autobiography ‘Race Against Me’ Chambers wrote that from 2002 to 2003 under Conte he was a “walking junkie” who took “more than 300 different concoctions” of drugs that cost him $30,000 a year. Eventually he tested positive for the steroid THG.
Now he is back and intent on dethroning Jamaican sprint sensation Usain Bolt — with Korchemny on board. Chambers added: “He still helps as much as he can. He wants to try and correct where we went wrong. It’s all about Project Bolt.”

By GEOFF SWEET