Double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius hopes to compete against the top stars at the World Championships in Berlin and has given himself a punishing schedule as he returns to the track after a boating accident.

After failing to make the qualifying times for last year's Beijing Olympics, the South African athlete won three gold medals in the Paralympics a month later.

Able-bodied athletes

Now, Pistorius has again set his sights on taking on the best able-bodied athletes and, in a bid to make the qualifying times for the August 15-23 World Champion-ships, will run at Golden League meets in Oslo and Rome as well as several other events in Europe.

"We are working quite hard towards Berlin and I want to get in some competitive races before that in Europe and hopefully the times will come down," Pistorius told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Manchester, where he is competing this week in the Paralympic World Cup.

"I hope to qualify for the 400 metres but also the relay."

Pistorius is chasing a qualifying time of 45.95 for the individual 400, for which his personal best is 46.23. The relay time he needs is 45.55.

"I would like to enter the individual one and we don't have any sub-45 runners in South Africa and it's going to be quite hard to qualify for the relay," Pistorius said.

Decision overturned

The 22-year-old athlete's running blades caused a storm during the build-up to the Olympics when the IAAF, athletics' world governing body, banned them on grounds that the carbon fibre limbs gave him an advantage even over able-bodied athletes.

That decision was overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Pistorius became eligible to compete in the Olympics but failed to make the qualifying times.

Pistorius' preparations for this season were jolted when he crashed his boat in February in South Africa.

"It's slowed me down a little bit but I'm very lucky and feeling pretty good," he said. "I had a lot of help from the medical team and friends and family. The first six weeks I couldn't do much (training) because I had broken my ribs."

Now, Pistorius faces tough opposition as he competes in Manchester for the first time since the crash.

"I'm just running the 100 and the 400," he said. "It's definitely good to have an extremely good level of competition with a lot of the top Americans deciding to come over and it makes it much harder."