Beijing opened a world-class training venue for disabled athletes this week in a bid to step up its sports facilities on the eve of the one-year countdown to the Beijing Paralympic Games.

The Sports and Vocational Training Center for the Disabled opened on Tuesday in south Beijing's Daxing District, two days before the countdown.

The venue will provide sports training for 10,000 athletes and job training for 20,000 people with disabilities each year, Games officials said.

It will also serve as a back-up training site after a national training camp for the disabled opened in July at Houshayu Township in northeast Beijing.

Games organizers said the new venue may become a warm-up site for Paralympians for both the home and away teams before and during next September's Paralympics, which trail the Olympics by a month.

Currently, several Chinese national teams, including the men's wheelchair basketball squad and the men's goalball squad, are training at the venue, which has a soccer pitch, a track and field ground, a swimming pool and many indoor courts for Paralympic sports.

"We moved here from Zhejiang Province the day before yesterday," Zhang Yong, coach of the men's goalball team, told China Daily.

His team is preparing for this month's 2007 International Goalball Tournament Competition, a Paralympics test event.

"The facilities here are magnificent," he said.