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4 hours ago
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Athletes in T-shirts, fans applying suncream - have these been the Summer or Winter Paralympics?
If you were to listen to American Patrick Halgren, who called the conditions at the Milan-Cortina Games "tropical" and "like surfing", you would think the former.
Until you were told he is a skier.
Since the 1992 Games, the Winter Paralympics have always been held in March, usually starting just shy of a fortnight after the conclusion of the Winter Olympics.
That means conditions during the Games have often been more spring-like than winter, with temperatures peaking at 26C four years ago in Beijing.
While such temperatures have not been felt in Cortina, it has been warm, and until a huge dump of snow fell the night before Sunday's final day of competition, snow had only been seen on the groomed competition pistes.
A blazing sun on several days of competition, mixed with some rain, had caused snow on the courses to turn soft and slushy, which in turns sticks to athletes' skis and snowboards.
Last weekend a third official training session for the Para-alpine skiing downhill events was cancelled in a bid to maintain the piste conditions.
While many athletes have praised the efforts of organisers to keep the tracks in as good a condition as possible, conditions on Friday during the men's giant slalom events were far from ideal, with British visually impaired skier Fred Warburton describing it as a "bathtub of Slush Puppie".
His guide, James Hannan, said: "The snow surface was changing every single gate, so we never knew how the ski was going to react.
"It was almost like survival of the fittest."
It certainly proved that way during the sitting event, which followed the visually impaired and standing races: 18 athletes from a field of 37 failed to make it to the bottom of the course.
"The organisers need to look at scheduling with obvious changes of the climate that we're experiencing," said Warburton.
"Both the Olympics and Paralympics want to be top spectacles of skiing and allow athletes to put their best work down.
"We need to look at the schedule and move it forward in future. That's way beyond my pay grade, but it seems pretty logical to me."
Warburton's words echoed those of retired American Paralympic snowboarder Amy Purdy, who this week said in a video on TikTok: "I don't believe that the Paralympics should be happening right now."
Her comments came after the snowboard cross course had to be adjusted following numerous crashes in training, partly because of its design but also the warm conditions.
