Sports! got thousands of new subscribers over the course of the Olympics, which made me say: huh! Maybe people want more coverage of international sporting events they don’t fully understand!"

GREAT NEWS! Today is the start of the 2026 Winter Paralympics!

The Paralympics are the world’s consistently mind-blowing sporting event. I watch a lot of sporting events, and nothing makes me say WHAT or HUH or WOW as consistently as the Paralympics.

I am not saying this to be inclusive. (Although hey, nice bonus.) I’m saying this because there’s no way to watch somebody with no legs ski a high-speed, turn-filled run without experiencing a small brain explosion.

However, the Paralympics also probably the world’s most misunderstood sporting event! Luckily, I like explaining things.

I’m not going to be a daily newsletter about the Paralympics like I did for the Olympics — I am very much still recovering from doing that! — but I wanted to let you know about why these games rule and maybe get you to tune in.

– Rodger Sherman

Let’s go through a quick FAQ:

The Paralympics are the pinnacle of adaptive sports — sports specifically designed for athletes with disabilities. They’re typically held a few weeks after the Olympics at the same venues.

🗣️ALPINE SKIING!!!!

Yeah!!!!!

Watching para alpine skiing will immediately strip you of any perception that the Paralympics are less-than. The Paralympic Alpine skiing events will be on the same slopes at Cortina D’Ampezzo used for the Olympics just a few weeks ago. The Paralympic skiers are going to throw themselves down those same slopes, pushing themselves as fast as they can go, hitting speeds of up to 70 miles per hour. You can’t kiddy-proof those slopes. Sometimes athletes crash.

Are the Paralympics different? Yes! That’s the point!

But in an event like para skiing, they’re not easier, safer, or less impressive. If anything, they’re probably harder and riskier, since it’s more difficult to ski if you’re missing limbs or if you’re blind.

Yeah!!!

Yes, there are visually impaired events in all four alpine skiing categories. The visually impaired athletes ski down the mountain with a guide ahead of them, giving audio instructions through a Bluetooth headset. Here’s a video of how it works:

Yeah!!!!!!!!!!!

And honestly, the other alpine skiing events are nuts too. Think about how important “legs” are to skiing. Then watch the sit skiing category, where the skiers don’t use their legs! Here’s the gold medal-winning men’s downhill sit-skiing run from 2014. There are at least 3 how did he save that? moments.

The Paralympics are actually a lot easier to break down than the Olympics. There are only six sports: Alpine skiing, cross-country skiing, biathlon, snowboarding, curling, and hockey.

Remember how I said there are 68 medal events in the three skiing sports? That’s because there are separate medals in each event for athletes who race standing, athletes who race sitting, and visually impaired athletes.

If you’re watching skiing, you may notice the clock running a bit slow. It’s not your mind playing tricks on you! The athletes’ times are adjusted based on their level of disability. A standing skier with an above-the-knee leg amputation, for example, will have their time adjusted more than a skier with an arm injury.

Here’s a really detailed breakdown of how the system works. Athough the idea of adjusting the athletes’ times may seem bizarre, it’s hard to look at the level of detail involved without feeling they’re trying as hard as they can to make the system as fair as possible to all competitors.

I guess. I’d rather write about the Sports! Honestly, I think the Paralympians would prefer that too!

I’m going to drop a link to something I wrote ahead of the 2024 Paralympics called “Why you — yes, you! — should watch the Paralympics.” You don’t need to watch the Paralympics to bolster your Good Person credentials. Honestly! You can just watch them because a bunch of athletes are going to do a bunch of cool stuff!

On Wednesday, I talked to Team USA curler Sean O’Neill, who called me from Cortina right before he watched the first event of the Paralympics — Team USA’s mixed doubles curling win over Latvia.

O’Neill is actually relatively new to wheelchair curling, having picked up the game just four years ago. But his local curling club on Cape Cod is a hotbed of wheelchair curling — he’s their fourth Paralympian — and they got him up to speed pretty quickly.

You can follow Sean on Instagram or BlueSky, where he’s live-posting the Paralympics; Here’s a longer interview with O’Neill about his life; I mainly asked him dumb questions about sports, and one smart question.

What have the Paralympics been like so far?

t’s my first Paralympic games and it’s been a lot in all the best ways. We’re with the para alpine and para snowboard, and seeing them, learning more about their sports, and being in a place where it’s all about para athletes and adaptive sports is pretty incredible. Usually we’re in a place of, parallel treatment at best, so to be the main show in town feels pretty incredible.

You do get quite the line for elevators, though, when we’re all going to one place.

Is there another Paralympic sport you’ve come across where you’re blown away that people manage to do that?

Yesterday I was talking to someone who’s a downhill skiing guide for visually impaired athletes…

(cutting Sean off because I got really excited thinking about blind people skiing again) YEAH!!!!!!!!!

… and the idea of being blind or in any way visually impaired and thinking downhill skiing is what I need to pursue seems like the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.

THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I’M WRITING ABOUT! IT’S GONNA BE IN THE POST THAT THIS INTERVIEW IS IN! IT’S GONNA BE ON TOP OF THIS INTERVIEW.

As it should!

You and your teammates live in different parts of the country, which is different from the USA curling team at the Olympics who were a pre-existing team before the Olympics. Have you been training together? What was the selection process like, and what has the process of building the team been like?

We’re normally off in our own states. The selection process for wheelchair curling is driven from our coaches, who select the five of us. We’re hoping to get to a point where it’s a playdown similar to Team Casper taking on Team Schuster, but we’re just not there yet in terms of the number of teams in wheelchair curling, but we’re getting closer all the time.

The five of us got selected just before Thanksgiving, and the last 2.5 months has really been a race to bond as a team. We were all friends, but the five of us had never played together. So we’ve been trying to be on ice as much as possible, traveling a lot to Minnesota, Wisconsin, everybody came out to my home club in Cape Cod. At least every other week, we’ve been traveling to see each other, to get on the ice, and we’ve really come a long way. A lot of credit really goes to the coaches, I think they selected us because they knew we would gel and bond as a team. But it’s been a hectic few months to try and make the most of this opportunity and be the best we can be.

If you’re just curling casually, do you compete with other wheelchair athletes? Or if you’re just going down to the club do you compete with able-bodied athletes.

This is a huge selling point for wheelchair curling. Curling is a super-inclusive sport. My club, the Cape Cod Curling Club, I’m a little biased, but it’s probably the premier wheelchair curling club in the country, so sometimes I play with all wheelchair curlers, but that’s a very rare opportunity that others wouldn’t have at other clubs. But if anyone in a wheelchair rolled into their curling club, they could hop into a league that night, play with able-bodied curlers and it’d be a really seamless experience for everybody involved.

You mentioned there aren’t a lot of all-wheelchair teams. In prep for the tournament, are you curling against other wheelchair teams? What has your prep been like?

We had the opportunity to travel internationally to play up in Canada and got reps in against the Canadian and British Paralympic teams, and some other Canadian wheelchair curling teams up there. But otherwise it’s been going to clubs and saying, who’s the best you have to throw against us, able-bodied curlers, and we’ll take them on. When we were in Madison, we played a team skipped by Madison Bear, who’s on Team Strouse that just won nationals on the women’s side.

One difference between the curling we just watched in the Olympics and wheelchair curling is there’s no sweeping. That means you can’t adjust shots once you throw them, which probably takes away a lot of the margin for error. How does that affect the gameplay and what types of shots you attempt?

Really smart question. (Editor’s note: Told you! One smart question. Bang!)

Right when the stone leaves the stick, the die is cast at that point. So it’s a slightly simpler game in some ways, but it also becomes more complex because we often end up with more rocks in play.

If you watch high-level Olympic able-bodied curling, there are shots that are easier with sweeping. We can still play all the same categories, but there are shots we don’t play that they play more routinely. And I think it often does lead to a more interesting game for the viewer, because you’ll tune in and see some houses and some setups that you did not see in the Olympics.

Your day job is as a lawyer. Do you just say, hey, I’m going to the Paralympics for a couple of weeks?

Yeah, that’s just about exactly what I said. I actually joined a new firm in May 2025, and said look, I do this curling thing, there’s a chance it becomes a Paralympics curling thing, I’ll keep you updated, but just letting you know, that’s a thing I do. And they’ve been incredibly supportive, beyond my wildest dreams. But yeah, on Monday morning, I put up an out-of-office that says hey, I’m on Team USA at the Paralympics, tune in for the next couple of weeks, and I’ll get back to you on March 17th.

Thanks to Sean for his time. And just FYI, if you’re an athlete of some sort and would like people to know more about your sport … reach out! I might put you on the Internet!

If you enjoyed watching the USA-Canada gold medal hockey matches, get ready for another one — Team USA and Canada have played in the last 8 Para Ice Hockey World Championship gold medal matches, with the Americans winning five and the Canadians winning three, including in 2024.

There’s no men’s and women’s sled hockey at the Olympics — technically, it’s a mixed event, although only two of the teams in the field have female athletes.

Team USA’s first game is Saturday against Italy. They’ll have to get through group play and the semifinals to reach the gold medal match, but let’s be real — they’re going to the gold medal match. That’ll be next Sunday.

Team USA’s greatest Paralympian is Oksana Masters, who holds the record for most Winter Paralympic medals with 14 … and that’s not even including her Summer Paralympic medals in cycling and rowing!

Masters has a remarkable life story — she was born with radiation-related birth defects after the Chernobyl disaster and grew up in a Ukrainian orphanage before being adopted by an American mother. She won three of Team USA’s six gold medals at the 2022 Paralympics: two in biathlon, one in cross-country. While the biathlon and cross-country events at the Olympics were in two different clusters, they’ll both be held at the same spot for the Paralympics, so Masters can compete in both as usual.

She’ll get competition from her teammate Kendall Gretsch, who beat Masters in the 10km biathlon in Beijing and won all three gold medals at last year’s World Championships. Masters’ husband, Aaron Pike, is also a 7-time Paralympian hoping to win his first medals after winning several World Championships in recent years.

Masters is competing in six events over the nine days of the Paralympics so, like … I think she’s just gonna be out there pretty much every day?

(Remember that movie? No? Not ringing a bell? Oh. OK. Yeah I didn’t even see it tbh. Kind of a niche reference.)

Brenna Huckaby is a back-to-back Paralympic gold medalist in snowboard — despite having a more serious impairment than most of her competitors.

Earlier we talked about Paralympic classifications. There are often accusations that some athletes are gaming the system — trying to sell their disability as more severe than reality to the official doing the assessment, in hopes of being placed in a different classification against less-able competitors. Huckaby’s scenario is the opposite.

She’s competing against less impaired athletes due to a lack of competitors with her specific injury. She’s classified as LL-1 — she has an above-the-knee amputation in her right leg after having bone cancer in her teens — and when LL-1 was a category at the Paralympics in 2018, she won double-gold in both Paralympic snowboarding events. But by the time the 2022 Paralympics rolled around, many of her competitors retired, and there weren’t enough for a full field in 2022. So her event was canceled. Initially the International Paralympic Committee was unwilling to let Huckaby compete in the LL-2 category for athletes with “less activity limitation” or below-the-knee amputations. She had to sue the IPC to compete in Beijing; when she won the case, IPC president Andrew Parsons released an unusually snippy statement that he was “extremely surprised and disappointed” about the ruling.

Despite “competing up” against less disabled athletes, Huckaby won gold in the banked slalom and bronze in snowboard cross. (You can pretty easily see that she’s the only athlete with a large prosthetic leg in that boardcross final.) It’s kinda wild! Her competitors have two knees! She only has one! Knees are important for turning! And yet she’s still a contender to medal and win these events.

Huckaby’s two medal events will be this Sunday, March 9th and next Saturday, March 14th.

During the Olympics I rec’d the Keep The Flame Alive podcast — they’re still on the ground in Italy and producing more episodes for the Paralympics!