Two of the five events at the Winter Paralympic Games in Sochi were held in the main Olympic Park: Ice Sledge Hockey and Wheelchair Curling. One is frenetic, fearsome, and fast, a game of nonstop aggression and head-on collisions; the other is a game of tactics, cunning, and concentration. Wheelchair Curling is by far the more gentle, but it loses none of the key elements of competition in the process nor is the game without its moments of controversy. Wheelchair Curling was introduced into the Paralympic program in Torino in 2006. The sport is the Paralympic equivalent of Curling with the difference lying in the way the players move around the field of play and handle the stone. And most notable—there are no sweeping techniques used. So the sport is no less tough physically and arguably even more complicated technically than Curling itself. The sport is open to male and female athletes with a physical disability in the lower half of the body, including spinal cord injuries, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and double-leg amputation. The sport is now practiced in 24 different countries.
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