There's a detail about the 2026 Winter Paralympics that most people will miss entirely: wheelchair curling starts March 4. Not March 6, when the Opening Ceremony lights up Verona Arena. Two days before that, in a curling stadium in Cortina d'Ampezzo, athletes from eight countries will be throwing stones for Paralympic medals while the rest of the world is still figuring out which Peacock subscription tier they need.

If you've been following the Games at all, this is the sport worth knowing. And 2026 is the year to learn it, because something is happening at Milano Cortina that has never happened before at the Winter Paralympics: wheelchair curling is getting its first-ever mixed doubles event.

No Sweeping

If you've watched Olympic curling and sort of understood it, wheelchair curling is a fast on-ramp. The house, the scoring, the 44-pound granite stones: all the same. But Olympic curling has sweeping. Wheelchair curling does not.

When a curler releases a stone in the Olympic version, teammates immediately start sweeping the ice ahead of it, using friction to adjust speed and curl. It's a constant mid-flight negotiation between what was thrown and where the team wants it to go. Wheelchair curling eliminates that entirely. Once the stone leaves the delivery stick, the trajectory is set. No adjustment possible. Every decision about weight and line has to be made before the stone goes.

As Team USA skip Matt Thums puts it: "In wheelchair curling, there's no sweeping. It's just however much weight and the line you put on the rock. And once you let it go, it's all on its own."

That one rule turns precision from a nice-to-have into the entire game. There's no safety net of sweeping to course-correct a slightly off throw.

Scoring, Delivery, and Format

Athletes throw from a stationary wheelchair, either releasing the stone by hand or pushing it forward with a delivery stick, an extendable cue that allows precise control from a seated position. Teammates can brace each other's wheelchairs during delivery for added stability.

A match runs eight ends. In each end, both teams alternate throwing stones toward a circular target called the house at the far end of the sheet. The goal is to have your stones sitting closer to the center, the tee, than your opponent's nearest stone when the dust settles. Each stone your team has inside the opponent's closest stone counts as one point. Three stones inside their nearest stone, you score three. Most points after eight ends wins. Ties go to extra ends until someone gets one.

In the mixed team format, five athletes compete, with at least one woman on the ice at all times. In the new mixed doubles event, two athletes compete per team, with a stone from each side already pre-positioned at the far end of the sheet before play begins. Each team also gets one Power Play per game: if you hold the hammer, meaning you throw the last stone of the end, you can move those pre-set stones to the edge of the house to create multi-point scoring opportunities.

The Mixed Doubles Debut

This is genuinely new territory. The mixed doubles event is making its Paralympic debut at Milano Cortina 2026, which is not an experimental run or an exhibition. Medals go to the podium starting March 11 at Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium.

Eight countries qualified for the mixed doubles draw: Italy, South Korea, the United States, China, Japan, Latvia, Great Britain with points earned by Scotland, and Estonia. The mixed team event runs on a separate schedule, with its gold medal game on March 14, the last full competition day before the Closing Ceremony.

Two American Entries

The U.S. arrives with two separate entries. The mixed team, skipped by Matthew Thums, includes Oyuna Uranchimeg, Sean O'Neill, Dan Rose, and Katie Verderber. For Thums and Uranchimeg, this is a second Paralympics; the other three are making their debuts.

In the mixed doubles, it's Laura Dwyer and Steve Emt, who will become the first U.S. pair in history to compete in the event at a Paralympic Games. Emt has been competing for Team USA since 2013, with eight world championships behind him and two Olympic cycles of experience: 12th at PyeongChang 2018, improving to fifth at Beijing 2022. Dwyer is a first-time Paralympian, and her path here is one of those stories you couldn't make up. She met Emt at a training camp in Phoenix and spent three days sharing ice with the national team before anyone told her who she was skating beside. Now she and Emt are going to the Games together, having won the U.S. Paralympic Trials in Sioux Falls in November, defeating Team Ricker/Samsa 9-7 to punch their tickets.

The Competition Field

China is the defending champion and is targeting its third consecutive Paralympic gold, which would match what Canada accomplished between 2006 and 2014. Canada remains the only program to have reached the wheelchair curling podium at every Games since the sport made its Paralympic debut on Italian ice at Torino 2006. They are going for a clean streak in the same country where it started.

Sweden is chasing a fourth Paralympic medal and its first gold. Italy, competing as host nation, is back in the field for the first time in 16 years and hoping to improve on a fifth-place finish from Vancouver 2010.

All of it happens at Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium, where sessions run March 4 through 14 and everything is on Peacock. If you are looking for somewhere to start with the Games before the Opening Ceremony even happens, mixed doubles round-robin play on March 4 is your answer.