国家奥林匹克体育中心

The National Olympic Sports Centre, known as Aoti, lies south of the North Fourth Ring Road at 1 Anding Road in Chaoyang District, next to the Olympic Green, the Olympic Forest Park and the athletes' village, facing the Bird's Nest across the ring road. It was begun in 1986 as a specialised venue cluster for the 11th Asian Games, designed under the architect Ma Guoxin, completed and opened in 1990, and now serves as a training base directly under the General Administration of Sport; it is the most training-intensive campus in Beijing's dual-Olympic map. The 66-hectare site contains a stadium, an indoor arena, the Yingdong Natatorium, hockey and tennis grounds, a multi-purpose training hall, football, athletics and softball training fields, athletes' accommodation and the anti-doping laboratory. The stadium in the south-central area was enlarged before 2008 to more than 37,000 square metres with 36,228 seats. The arena to the north has over 32,400 square metres, a 40 by 70 metre floor and about 6,300 seats. The natatorium totals 44,635 square metres for some 6,000 spectators, while the hockey ground offers three floodlit 101.4 by 63 metre artificial-turf pitches and twelve floodlit hard tennis courts lie to its south. The Olympic refit launched in 2006 cost about 1.3 billion yuan and lifted total floor area to 220,000 square metres. What distinguishes Aoti is the parallel running of training, competition and mass fitness. It has staged the Asian Games, the Seventh National Games, the Far East and South Pacific Games for the Disabled, the Universiade and the 2008 Olympics, and it hosts national squads year round, while opening swimming, tennis, hockey and athletics facilities to the public as one of the few large sports parks along the North Fourth Ring Road. The architecture is a plain 1990s sports modernism, refreshed after 2008 with metal roofs and glass curtain walls; the stadium's east and west stands face each other symmetrically and the natatorium sits by the lake. Aoti station on metro line 8 opens directly into the campus, Olympic Green station is also within walking distance, and buses run densely along the North Fourth Ring Road and Anding Road, with several car parks on site.