The 2026 Winter Paralympic Games kick off Friday in Italy, at the same ancient amphitheater in Verona where the Olympics officially wrapped up last month.
Milan Cortina marks the 50th anniversary of the Winter Paralympics, which happen every four years in the same host city as the Winter Olympics. It's the third Paralympics to take place in Italy, after the inaugural 1960 edition in Rome and the 2006 Games in Turin.
This time, they — like the Olympics — will be scattered across northern Italy, with competitions clustered in Milan, Cortina D'Ampezzo and Val di Fiemme.
Over 10 days, some 665 of the world's top athletes with physical, visual and intellectual disabilities will compete for a record 79 medals across six sports: para Alpine skiing, para biathlon, para cross-country skiing, para ice hockey, para snowboard and wheelchair curling.
The U.S. is represented by 68 athletes (and four guides), many of whom are decorated, multi-season Paralympic veterans. It has the second-largest contingent after China, which dominated the medal count for the first time at the 2022 Beijing Paralympics. Team USA remains the all-time leader in Winter Paralympic medals and is looking to add to its collection.
Here's what to know as you follow the action.
How do I tune in?
Friday's opening ceremony will be broadcast by NBC, online and on Peacock, live at 2 p.m. ET and again in primetime at 8 p.m.
The "Life in Motion"-themed event is set to include musical performances by The Police's drummer Stewart Copeland and Italian house music group Meduza, among others. The 56 participating delegations will march in a customary Parade of Nations, with the U.S. flag carried by two of the country's most decorated Paralympians: four-time sled hockey champion Josh Pauls and seven-time Alpine skiing medalist Laurie Stephens.
That opens a week-and-a-half of competition, culminating in the closing ceremony in Cortina on Sunday, March 15.
Along the way, NBC says it will offer a record eight hours of Winter Paralympics coverage on TV, including primetime windows on both Saturdays. The first will cover opening ceremony highlights and medal events from the first full day of competition, while the second will focus on top performances and U.S. Paralympians.
The network is promising even more comprehensive coverage on Peacock, which it says will stream every sport and event live, along with full-event replays and viewing experiences like discovery multiview. There will also be cable viewing options, from USA Network on weekdays and CNBC on weekends. You can view NBC's full schedule here.
The Paralympics traditionally get less coverage and viewership than the Olympics, though Beijing 2022 and Paris 2024 continued to set and smash records.
Since then, a group of Paralympic athletes has launched Culxtured, a media collective dedicated to elevating para sports. Co-founder Brenna Huckaby, a U.S. snowboarder and four-time Paralympic medalist, calls it a "one-stop shop for para sport," both in terms of helping audiences follow along and helping athletes grow their own platforms.
"Visibility is huge," Huckaby told reporters in October. "If you don't see yourself represented, how do you know you can do it?"
Who — and what — should I be following?
Some of the biggest storylines heading into the Games involve longtime rivalries and new competitions.
The U.S.-Canada hockey rivalry continues, fresh off Team USA's two Olympic victories.
Now, the U.S. Paralympic sled hockey team is going after a record fifth consecutive gold medal (and sixth overall).
To win it, Americans will have to hold off their primary challenger, Canada, which won silver in the last two Paralympics and the World Para Ice Hockey Champions in 2024, though the U.S. beat them to reclaim that title in 2025. The U.S. is fielding yet another strong team, captained by Pauls and including many seasoned veterans, including all-time leading scorer Declan Farmer, forward Brody Roybal and goaltender Jen Lee.
If history is any indication, the two teams could once again make the gold medal match on the last day of the Games.
There's plenty to watch before then, including a whopping 81 wheelchair curling matches. The competition — and another curling scandal — got underway even before the opening ceremony, when two stones were reported stolen from the Cortina venue. This year also marks the Paralympic debut of wheelchair curling's mixed doubles events, featuring the American duo of Steve Emt and Laura Dwyer.
Many Americans are looking to defend past Paralympic titles. They include Huckaby, who was the only U.S. snowboarder to win gold (two medals, actually) in 2022.
At those same Games, Oksana Masters became the first American to win seven medals (in biathlon and cross-country) in a single Paralympics. Masters, the most decorated U.S. Paralympian ever, is looking to add a 20th medal — or more — to her collection, despite a series of injuries, infections and a recent concussion that she revealed on Instagram just days before the Games. Her fiancé, Aaron Pike, a nine-time world medalist in para biathlon, is eyeing his first medal at his eighth Paralympics.
There are also rising U.S. stars making their Paralympic debuts, like teenage Alpine skiers Meg Gustafson and Audrey Crowley, snowboarder Kate Delson and sled hockey players Kayden Beasley, Brett Bolton, Liam Cunningham and Landon Uthke.
The inevitable feats of athleticism and sportsmanship are set to unfold against a backdrop of higher-than-usual geopolitical tensions, amidst multiple ongoing wars.
The U.S. and Israel attacked Iran after weeks of failed nuclear negotiations, days after the Olympic closing ceremony in late February, violating the symbolic Olympic truce and prompting retaliatory strikes across the Middle East. Iran will no longer be represented in the Paralympics, officials said Friday, because its sole athlete is unable to travel safely.
Meanwhile, a total of 10 athletes from Russia and Belarus are allowed to compete at the Paralympics under their own flags — despite their ongoing war in Ukraine — rather than as neutral athletes, like several Olympians did last month. This marks the first time a Russian flag will be flown at the Paralympics since 2014. Some half-dozen European countries, as well as the U.K., are boycotting the opening ceremony in protest.
Remind me how the Paralympics work?
The Paralympics have their roots in a British hospital for World War II veterans with spinal injuries, which organized a wheelchair archery competition — called the Stoke Mandeville Games — in conjunction with the 1948 Olympics in London.
Those expanded into the Paralympic Games in Rome in 1960, and have been held every four years since. The first Winter Paralympics took place in Sweden in 1976, featuring fewer than 200 athletes competing in just two sports: Para alpine skiing and Para cross-country skiing.
The Paralympics are meant to be held in tandem with the Olympics — it's literally in the name. And they have shared the same cities and venues since the Summer Games of 1988 and the Winter Games of 1992, typically about two weeks apart.
There are some key differences between the two movements, like their distinct governing bodies, logos (Olympic rings vs. Paralympic "Agitos" aka crescents) and mascots (in this case, Tina the stoat has passed the winter torch to her sibling, Milo).
The Paralympics feature athletes with eight kinds of physical disabilities (including limb deficiency and impaired muscle power) as well as vision and intellectual impairment. They are grouped into competition categories based on the "degree of activity limitation resulting from their impairments."
"One of the biggest misconceptions is that we are exactly like the Olympics, just disabled," Huckaby said. "But … my sport, while it's very similar to its Olympic cousin, our strategy is different, our courses are different, the way we go about racing is just different. And that difference isn't less than; that difference is just a different sport."
Athletes in the skiing sports, for example, compete in either standing, sitting or vision impaired categories. Para curling, unlike its Olympic counterpart, doesn't allow sweeping. And para ice hockey players use specialized sleds and two sticks instead of one.
"And that's really the biggest difference in the game, and that's what kind of drives it to be such a unique sport, because having those two sticks, it actually leads to a lot less possession than you see in stand-up hockey," said Farmer, a four-time Paralympian at age 28.
Para athletes all told NPR that they hope people will pay attention to their sports, even if it means having to learn a thing or two about them (as many Olympic and Paralympic viewers are used to doing every four years). Huckaby, the snowboarder, says, "If you take a minute to learn about para sport, you will be a para sport fan."
"And once you become a fan, share it with your friends, with your family, with your neighbors, because the more people that know about it, the more fans we're going to have," she added. "And the more fans we have, the more demand for broadcasting. The more demand for broadcasting, it's actually going to happen and the movement's going to grow."
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