The Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games (Italian: Milano Cortina 2026 Giochi paralimpici invernali), also known as the 2026 Winter Paralympics (Italian: Giochi paralimpici invernali del 2026) and Milano Cortina 2026, is an upcoming international wintermulti-sport event for athletes with disabilities, scheduled to take place from 6 to 15 March, with the Italian cities of Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo as hosts.
The torch relay is scheduled to take place from 24 February to 6 March 2026, with 501 torchbearers covering 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi). The flame will be lit at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital in the United Kingdom, followed by flame festivals in five Italian cities; the relay will visit Cortina d'Ampezzo, Venice, and Padua, before ending at the Verona Arena for the opening ceremony.[10]
Volunteers
A total of 18,000 volunteers will be involved with both the 2026 Paralympic and Olympic Games. Applications for volunteering opened on 19 September 2024.[11] As of December 2024, almost 70,000 applications have been received.[12]
Ticketing
Tickets for the 2026 Paralympic Games start at €10 for children under 14, with more than 200,000 tickets priced at under €35, corresponding to around 89% of all available tickets. Registration for the ticketing platform opened on 4 October 2024; ticket sales will start in March 2025.[13]
The schedule for the 2026 Paralympics was released on 9 December 2024.Due the large schedule,the competition will begin on 4 March, two days before the opening ceremony, with the first two rounds of the wheelchair curling mixed doubles, and end on 15 March 2026.[17]
On 30 March 2021, following a public vote between two candidates designed by Landor Associates, a design named "Futura" was announced as the emblem of both the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics. The Paralympic version is coloured with a red, blue, and green gradient to symbolise an aurora and the colours of the Paralympic agitos.[19][20][21]
An online vote closing on 28 February 2023 was held among a list of candidates to select the mascots of the Olympics and Paralympics, with the winning candidates being inspired by stoats.[22] Their names were revealed to be Tina and Milo (derived from the names of the host cities),[23] with Milo, the brown stoat, being the Paralympic mascot. The character is portrayed as having been born without a leg, and represents ingenuity, willpower and creativity.[24]
.svg){kind=small}
.svg){kind=logo}