Milano Cortina 2026: Para alpine skiers take on celebrated Olympia delle Tofane

Austria have been tough enough opponents in Para alpine skiing – that’s without one family scooping up buckets of medals between them, as the Aigner siblings did at Beijing 2022. 

Austria lead the Para alpine medal table with 94 golds, but there is no shortage of challengers from Europe, Asia and the Americas at the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games. 

Skiers will compete across five disciplines: downhill, super-G, giant slalom, slalom and alpine combined.  

Male and female Para alpine skiers will compete in one of three categories: sitting, standing or vision impaired, for a total of 30 medal events across the five disciplines. 

Only two of the four Aigners will compete at these Games.  

And Johannes Aigner will face tough competition in the vision impaired category from the likes of home talent Giacomo Bertagnolli, who matched Johannes’ haul of two golds in Beijing.  

France’s Arthur Bauchet won three gold medals at Beijing 2022, and competes at Milano Cortina 2026 in all five disciplines in the standing category. 

Five-time gold medallist Jesper Pedersen of Norway is the man to beat in the sitting category. 

Six female athletes topped the podium more than one in Beijing. 

In the sitting category, Japan’s Momoka Muraoka took three golds and Germany's Anna-Lena Forster earned two. Veronika Aigner and Slovakia's Henrieta Farkasova each won two golds in the vision impaired category, while China's Mengqiu Zhang and Sweben's Ebba Aarsjoe topped the podium twice in the standing category.

Alpine skiers could ask for no more venerable a stage than the Olympia delle Tofane, a course with a long Olympic history. The Tofane hosted the men's alpine skiing trials at Cortina d'Ampezzo 1956.  The course is famed for its fearsomely steep Tofana Schuss section. 

Can the Aigner ‘nation’ repeat past glory? 

A serious knee injury nearly scuppered Veronika Aigner’s Beijing 2022 hopes. Now, her sister and guide Elisabeth has torn the cruciate ligament in her left knee. 

Whereas Veronika not only recovered but won two golds in Beijing, Elisabeth will not compete at Milano Cortina 2026, citing the risk of falling and taking Veronika with her. 

At the end of February, the Austrian Paralympic Committee and Ski Austria were still weighing the options for a replacement guide for one of the winter Games’ superstars. 

Or, more accurately, superstar families. After Beijing 2022, a New York Times headline read: “The skiing Aigners are a nation unto themselves.”  

Veronika, Elisabeth and their siblings Barbara and Johannes had won nine medals, including four golds. A theoretical Aigner ‘nation’ would have finished eighth in the Beijing 2022 medal table. 

Johannes, still only 20, won two of those golds. He is relishing the prospect of the infamously difficult Tofane slope. 

“It’s not the easiest downhill run, and I think that makes it so exciting,” he says. “You can really let off the steam a bit in terms of skiing technique.” 

That’s lucky as he, like Veronika, will compete in all five alpine disciplines in the vision impaired category, meaning the siblings could take home 10 medals between them. 

Italian skiers to keep the party going? 

Giacomo Bertagnolli has eight Paralympic medals to his name. But he will try to balance ambition with enjoyment at Milano Cortina 2026.  

“Four years is a long time to stay focused on one goal, but if I am going to win one medal, it would be worth it. Of course, I would like to win more than one, but I want to enjoy Milano Cortina; we are in Italy and it is going to be super fun for me.” 

Be under no illusion, though: Bertagnolli is aiming to sweep the five events in the vision-impaired category.  

At PyeongChang 2018, he said he had no expectations – yet still won two golds. By Beijing 2022, he had learned to manage his emotions, but ‘only’ equalled his golds tally. He now says he aims to top the podium five times in front of his home crowd. 

Like Bertagnolli, Italian flagbearer René De Silvestro also lives close to the venue, at San Vito di Cadore, a 20-minute drive from Cortina. 

He has spoken of the glorious party mood created during the past Olympic Winter Games, and says the Para athletes cannot wait to get started.  

De Silvestro competes in all five disciplines in the sitting category and hopes to better the silver and bronze medals he took home from Beijing. 

Japan holds its breath for two greats of the sport 

Two Japanese athletes are poised on the brink as they approach Milano Cortina 2026.  

Top prospect Momoka Muraoka, 29, has not raced since November, when she broke her collarbone.  

Her idol, 45-year-old Taiki Morii, is considering retiring from top-level competition after the Games. He has eight medals to his name, none of them gold. 

Muraoka has not even been able to train at top speed, finishing last among the eight skiers in the official training held three days before the Opening Ceremony. She jokes that her doctor has allowed her to ski provided she doesn’t fall over. 

If she can manage that – and at speed – she could add to the four golds in Para alpine sitting events she won across the last two Paralympic Winter Games. 

Morii, who dubs himself “the silver collector”, will compete at his seventh consecutive Winter Paralympics. He was inspired by watching Nagano 1998 from his hospital bed after injuring his spinal cord in a motorbike accident at 16. 

Allow us to introduce… 

Haiti, North Macedonia, El Salvador, Portugal and Montenegro all make their Winter Paralympic debuts at Milano Cortina 2026.  

Haiti’s Ralf Etienne will compete in the men’s giant slalom standing category.  

It seems an unimaginable outcome for a man who was left dangling by his legs for eight hours from a four-story building in the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake.  

Etienne’s improbable story continued courtesy of a US surgeon who took him to the USA to have a prosthetic leg fitted. After winning a US college scholarship, Etienne went on a skiing trip with friends in the last year of his MBA – and was hooked. 

Now an investment banker working in London, Etienne shuttles between desk, airport and mountain – and claims his Paralympic qualification campaign has made him a better banker. 

“It's basically a story of rubble in 2010 to the summit in 2026. It's a beautiful turnaround," he said with a smile after a training session at Milano Cortina 2026.

“It means a lot to fight so hard to bring my country here. It's like I'm carrying my country on one leg. But it's good - I get to do this for Haiti.

“I get a platform to show Haitian resilience, Haitian excellence, Haitian leadership, Haitian ability to accomplish great things.”

A tale of two rivals 

Competition, says Jesper Pedersen, is the point of skiing. “It would be boring to do it all by myself,” he says. 

Luckily he has Jeroen Kampschreur to ski against. The pair have been trying to best each other for the past decade. 

When it comes to World Championship golds the two 26-year-old sitting skiers are neck and neck, with nine each. 

But at the Paralympic Winter Games, Pedersen very much has the edge, with five golds from the past two Games, while Kampschreur has just the one, in super combined in 2018. 

Kampschreur says the pair are more like “colleagues”. 

"It's not like you are face-to-face or fighting each other directly. You have to wait for the other one to perform his best, and you have no influence over that. If someone skis fast, then he did well. I give him a handshake, we move on, and we try to beat him next time." 

Secure your tickets for the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games  

Milano Cortina 2026, which takes place from 6-15 March 2026, is set to be the most beautiful Paralympic Winter Games yet. Ticket prices start at EUR 10 for children under 14, with approximately 89 per cent of the tickets available for EUR 35 or less.

For more information, please visit tickets.milanocortina2026.org