Paralympics preview: The basics

It all begins with tomorrow’s 6:30 a.m. ET Opening Ceremony (airing on USA Network in the U.S., CBC in Canada) and will conclude with the Closing Ceremony on Sunday, March 13th.

• A maximum of 736 Paralympians will compete in 78 medal events across six sports — alpine skiing, biathlon, cross-country skiing, sledge hockey, snowboarding and wheelchair curling.

• Forty-nine National Paralympic Committees will be represented at the Games, with Azerbaijan, Israel and Puerto Rico set to make their Winter Paralympic debuts. Party.

Unlike the Olympics, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) uses a classification system to determine how athletes are grouped for competition.

• Each sport class consists of a letter and number combo corresponding to the sport (“SB” stands for snowboarding, for example) and the impairment type (“SB-UL” indicates the snowboarder has a significant impairment in one or both arms).