There's a moment early in a para alpine skiing broadcast when a first-time viewer gets that flicker of confusion. The athletes look different from one another. Some are on two skis, some are on one. One has a person running alongside them with an earpiece. The clock is ticking, and the number that comes up when the run finishes is nothing like the raw time you watched.

Para alpine skiing is not complicated once you understand the framework. It carries more medal events than any other sport at the 2026 Winter Paralympics, 30 in total, running from March 7 through 15 at the Tofane Alpine Skiing Centre in Cortina. If you want to watch any of it with your kids or your family and know what's happening, here's the setup.

The Five Disciplines

The racing at Tofane covers five events, each asking something different from the athletes.

Downhill is what the sport looks like at full speed. Athletes cover long courses down steep terrain, cresting 100 kilometres per hour, and the winner is whoever gets to the bottom fastest. Technique matters, but commitment matters more. Super-G, the super giant slalom, is a close cousin: a little shorter, a few more gates, a bit more turning required. Both events reward athletes who are most at home on steep, open terrain at high speed.

Slalom is the discipline where precision wins. Gates are tight, direction changes come fast, and there's almost no room for error. The athletes who dominate slalom events are usually the ones who can hold perfect form while their body is working hard to execute a completely different line every fraction of a second. Giant slalom sits in the middle ground: more gates than super-G but more space than slalom, which opens the competition up to a wider range of athletic profiles.

Super combined brings slalom and super-G together into a single result. Athletes complete one run of each, the times are added, and the lowest total wins. It rewards range, and the athletes who medal in it tend to be the most complete skiers in the field.

How the Categories Work

Para alpine skiing is organized into three categories, and understanding them is the key to following the leaderboard.

Standing athletes have upper or lower limb impairments, or a combination of both. They ski upright on two skis, with equipment and technique adapted to their functional ability. The range within this category is wide: an athlete missing one hand and an athlete with a significant leg impairment are both competing here, which is where the classification system comes in.

Sitting athletes compete in a sit-ski or monoski: a specially designed seat mounted to a single ski, with a shock absorber that handles the forces of uneven terrain and sharp turns. They use outriggers for stability, short poles with small ski tips at the bottom, and their control through the course is something worth watching carefully. Sit-skiing joined the official Paralympic program at Nagano 1998, and the technique athletes have developed in the decades since is genuinely remarkable.

Visually impaired athletes ski with a guide who runs slightly ahead, connected by a Bluetooth radio system. The guide calls turns, warns about upcoming terrain features, and reads the course in real time so the athlete can ski it at speed. The communication between guide and athlete is its own discipline, refined over years of practice together.

Because athletes within each category have different levels of impairment, raw times alone don't determine the results. A formula is applied to each run time based on the athlete's sport class, producing a factored time. The fastest factored time wins. Once you know this, the leaderboard stops being confusing and starts being fascinating: you're watching the sport work as it was designed to work.

The Athletes to Follow

For Team USA, the starting point is Andrew Kurka. At 13, an ATV accident left him with a severe spinal cord injury. Two years later, a physical therapist connected him with Challenge Alaska's adaptive skiing program. That path went to PyeongChang 2018, where he won gold in sitting downhill and silver in super-G, becoming the first Alaskan to win a Paralympic medal in any sport. Milano Cortina is his fourth Games.

Laurie Stephens is competing in her sixth Paralympic Games in the sitting category, making her one of the longest-tenured athletes on the U.S. team. She and Kurka anchor a Team USA para alpine squad of 23 athletes: 11 sitting, 11 standing, and one visually impaired skier in Meg Gustafson, who races with her brother Spenser as guide.

On the international side, Giacomo Bertagnolli brings the home-crowd factor: a visually impaired Italian skier with a medal record that makes him a legitimate contender at his home Games. Austria's Johannes Aigner medaled in all five events at Beijing 2022, which is as complete a performance as the sport produces. Germany's Anna-Lena Forster is a nine-time Paralympic and multi-world championship medalist whose sit-ski career has run for more than a decade without slowing down.

Where to Start if You're Watching for the First Time

The sitting downhill on March 7 opens competition at Tofane. Kurka won the 2018 version of this event, and speed events are the best entry point for new viewers: the courses are long enough to watch technique develop, the speeds are visible in a way slalom isn't, and you'll see all three categories competing, which gives you the full picture of how the sport is structured.

After that, a slalom event mid-week will show you a completely different athletic profile. Same mountain, same categories, entirely different skill set on display.

The full schedule and streaming links are at Olympics.com. All events stream on Peacock, with 270+ hours of Paralympic coverage across the Games.