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Team USA dominated the Paralympics on both ice and snow. Check out the highlights
The U.S. men’s sled hockey team celebrates after winning its fifth straight Paralympics gold medal on Sunday.
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Stefano Rellandini/AFP via Getty Images
Team USA finished second in the overall Paralympics medal count, after 10 days of competition in which American athletes made dazzling debuts, defended titles and cemented legacies.
One of the many made-for-TV moments came just hours before the closing ceremony on Sunday, when the U.S. sled hockey team defeated rival Canada to claim its record fifth gold medal in a row.
“You don’t ever start out and try to be the only five-time gold medalist in the sport,” said captain Josh Pauls after personally achieving that very feat. “But to be with these guys, to lead them and kind of pass on that tradition, it’s the ultimate honor.”
The day — and the Games — ended with the closing ceremony in Cortina d’Ampezzo, featuring performances, speeches and the extinguishing of the Paralympic flame. American skiers Kendall Gretsch and Andrew Kurka, who are both leaving Italy with new medals, carried the flag for Team USA.
“I’ve been involved in four Games and have only been able to go to two closing ceremonies: in PyeongChang, where I won my gold and silver, and this year, where I won my bronze,” said Kurka, who medaled in men’s super-G. “It’s been a career filled with ups and downs, but even the small victories count for me.”
Andrew Kurka and Kendall Gretsch carry the U.S. flag during the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Paralympic Games closing ceremony in Cortina on Sunday.
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At the ceremony, International Paralympic Committee (IPC) President Andrew Parsons declared the Games — the 50th anniversary of the Winter Paralympics — officially over, and a success: “The biggest and most beautiful Winter Paralympics with more athletes, more nations, more women and more global broadcast and digital coverage than ever before.”
A record 611 athletes from 55 countries competed in 79 medal events across six sports.
China topped the medal count for the second Winter Games in a row, with 44 total medals (15 gold), followed by the U.S. with 24 total medals, including 13 gold. The U.S. improved on its fifth-place standing from 2022. This is the same number of gold medals it won in 2018, in what officials are calling its “strongest gold-medal showing in the last 20 years.”
A total of 28 American Paralympians and two guides reached the podium this year. Six of them won medals for the first time, and six of them earned multiple medals, according to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC).
In third place — both overall and in gold medals — was Russia, which was allowed to participate under its own flag for the first time since 2014 despite its ongoing war in Ukraine. Ukrainian athletes boycotted both the opening and closing ceremonies in protest.
But even in a moment of intense geopolitical upheaval, amid conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, the IPC’s Parsons said the Paralympics offered “proof that sport can unite us through respect, fairness and human achievement.”
“Paralympians, you rose above pressure, expectation and global tension to keep the focus where it belongs: on you and your sport,” he said. “You expanded the imagination of the world. You have shown that excellence is universal and that determination knows no boundaries.”
Parsons passed the proverbial torch to the next Winter Paralympics host: the French Alps for 2030. Those will follow the 2028 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Los Angeles.
Team USA highlights
Team USA’s Declan Farmer, center, fights for the puck during the gold-medal match against Canada.
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Antonio Calanni/AP
On the ice:
The U.S. sled hockey team got off to a strong start in an early-round match against Italy, when it beat the host nation 14-1 — the largest margin of victory in the sport’s U.S. history.
It stayed dominant, outscoring opponents 46-6 throughout the tournament before becoming the first Paralympic or Olympic team to win five consecutive winter gold medals.
“You are going to enjoy something like this, for sure,” Coach David Hoff said afterward. “But I don’t know if it’s just the wins. It’s so much more than that. They just love playing together.”
Team USA beat Canada 6-2 on Sunday, thanks to a hat trick from Jack Wallace — who was named “best defender” of the tournament — and goals by Kayden Beasley, Brody Roybal and four-time Paralympian Declan Farmer.
Farmer, the top scorer and official MVP of these Games, scored 15 goals and 26 points throughout the tournament to become the all-time leading scorer in Paralympic sled hockey history at just 28 years old. But he was quick to share the credit with his teammates.
“A lot of the guys stepped up and had their best games of the tournament, and we just carried each other,” said Farmer. “I’m just so happy for the guys, we earned it together.”
You’re forgiven if you have deja vu from last month: This win makes the U.S. the first country to sweep all three Olympic and Paralympic hockey tournaments in one year.
Team USA also made history in wheelchair curling, with Steve Emt and Laura Dwyer finishing fourth in the brand-new mixed doubles event. That’s the United States’ best-ever Paralympic finish in the sport.
“In the two years we’ve been together, we’ve shown the world what we’re capable of doing and we’re going to go home, take some time off, relax, re-group and come back even better next year,” said Emt, the most decorated Paralympic curler in U.S. history.
In Para Nordic Skiing (cross country and biathlon):
Oksana Masters competes in the para cross-country skiing 20km in Tesero, Italy, on Sunday.
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Eight-time, dual-season Paralympian Oksana Masters, the most decorated Winter Paralympian in U.S. history, is leaving Italy with four new gold medals and a bronze in biathlon and cross-country skiing events, bringing her career total to 24 medals.
That’s despite a concussion, infection and injury that almost kept her from competing in the first place.
“I think that is what makes it so special, because nothing is guaranteed,” Masters told NPR on Saturday. “A win’s not guaranteed, and the podium’s not guaranteed, and so that’s been a really great motivator for this whole … year so far.”
Four-time Paralympian Jake Adicoff, with guides Reid Goble and Peter Wolter, won four gold medals in four visually impaired skiing events to set a new record for the most Para cross-country golds won by a Team USA athlete in a single Games.
Joshua Sweeney, Oksana Masters, Sydney Peterson, Jake Adicoff and his guide Reid Goble of Team USA participate in the medal ceremony after the para cross-country skiing mixed 4×2.5km relay.
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“It’s incredibly scary to put a high goal out to the public,” the 30-year-old said. “I was doubting it so much this week, I didn’t know what was going to happen, but the races came together and I’m just overjoyed.”
One of those was the mixed 4×2.5km relay, where the all-star team of Adicoff, Masters, Josh Sweeney and Sydney Peterson came from behind in the final leg to defend the U.S. title.
Peterson, competing in her second Paralympics, won four medals — three of them gold — this time around.
And Kendall Gretsch, closing ceremony flag-bearer, won four medals at her third Winter Paralympics (and fifth total): one gold, one silver and two bronze. That brings her total medal count to 11 across Summer and Winter Games.
In Alpine skiing:
Andrew Kurka competes in the super-G leg of the para Alpine skiing men’s combined.
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Maja Hitij/Getty Images
Andrew Kurka won bronze in the men’s super-G sitting, adding to his silver and gold from 2018.
“I’m happy to be here. I’m happy to have a great career. Gold, silver, and bronze, happy to be done,” said Kurka, who wrote on Instagram after the closing ceremony that he is stepping back from ski racing to deal with injuries.
In 2022, he competed with a broken nose, thumb and humerus bone, finishing fourth in the sitting downhill event before withdrawing from the rest of competition. Kurka said in Italy that he’s broken over 20 bones in his career.
“When it comes to it, losing is nothing compared to the pain of failure,” he said after winning bronze. “And when it comes down to today, I was just happy to get across that finish line without any injuries and in a relatively quick time. Usually, if I cross the finish line, it’s pretty fast.”
Meanwhile, Patrick Halgren won silver in the men’s super-G standing event — the first for Team USA since 1998.
Patrick Halgren celebrates after winning a silver medal in the alpine skiing men’s super-G standing on Monday.
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Emilio Morenatti/AP
The 33-year-old wasn’t necessarily a favorite for the podium, having placed 26th and 24th at his events in the Beijing Paralympics. But Halgren said he felt the presence of his late twin brother Sven — his source of encouragement to try para Alpine skiing — who died in a motorcycle accident in 2016. Halgren himself lost most of his left leg, and nearly his life, in a motorcycle accident three years earlier.
Halgren, who wowed the internet with his winning performance and rock-star persona, dedicated his win to Sven and called it the “best day of my life until tomorrow.”
“You celebrate the victories the same as the defeats,” he added. “I’ve been blessed to have to develop my character over the last 11 years, losing my leg, and could either roll over and die, or I could become the greatest Patrick Halgren on Earth, and that’s what you’re seeing.”
In snowboarding:
Kate Delson, center, and Brenna Huckaby, right, of Team U.S. pose for a photo on the podium during the medal ceremony for the para snowboard banked slalom.
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Three-time Paralympian Brenna Huckaby leaves Italy as the most decorated Paralympic snowboarder in history.
She won bronze in the women’s banked slalom event — which she dominated in 2022 — to bring her career total to five medals. That came days after she finished sixth in the snowboard cross event, which she still saw as a win.
“I’m here representing a very small portion of people who want to see themselves represented,” Huckaby said. “They want to know that if they lose their leg above the knee, life does not end. I accomplished that here simply by being. So I’m happy.”
First-time Paralympian Kate Delson medaled in both of those events, winning gold in the banked slalom and silver in snowboard cross.
“I was just stoked to be here, I think it’s such a fun course,” Delson said after. “I got to get a medal with my teammate, [Huckaby], one of my best friends in the world, that’s unreal.”
On the men’s side, Noah Elliott won gold in the banked slalom, a repeat of 2018, and silver in snowboard cross to double his career medal count.
Mike Schultz brought home a bronze medal in his final Paralympics, for which he outfitted many athletes with their prosthetics.
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Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
And Mike Schultz earned his fourth career medal — bronze in banked slalom — at the last race of his third and final Paralympics.
“To finish my last run and bring home a bronze medal, that’s storybook stuff there,” Schultz said in an emotional Instagram video after watching a compilation of congratulatory messages from his U.S. snowboarding teammates, whom he called his family.
All the while, the 44-year-old outfitted many para athletes — including some who beat him — with high-performance prosthetics, a business he has run for over a decade, which he plans to pursue in retirement.
SNAP is the country’s largest anti-hunger program, serving the 1 in 8 U.S. residents who live at or just above the poverty line.
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States are starting to enforce expanded work requirements and other changes for people receiving aid from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps.
Those newly at risk of losing the benefit include able bodied recipients aged 55-64, parents of children 14-17, veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and young people who are aging out of foster care.
The changes are part of a 20% funding cut to the program under President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year.
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Tennessee Republicans on Wednesday proposed a congressional map aimed at diluting the state’s lone majority-Black district, a swift response to last week’s Supreme Court ruling that weakened a landmark voting rights law.
The new map slices Memphis, a majority-Black city, and Shelby County into three districts and likely will give Republicans the ability to flip Tennessee’s lone remaining Democratic seat, which includes the city.
Democratic lawmakers, whose opposition means little under a Republican supermajority in the state’s General Assembly, and Black leaders across Tennessee have compared the effort to carve up the Ninth Congressional District to Jim Crow-era voter suppression tactics. They have accused conservatives of a power grab that undermines Black voters in Memphis, who have long favored Democrats.
Republicans, cheered on by President Trump, have rejected those claims. Instead, they have said, they are responding to the Supreme Court ruling, which raised the bar for what constitutes a racial gerrymander under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Tennessee joins a series of states that have engaged in tit-for-tat redistricting battles since last summer, when Mr. Trump called for Republican-led states to redraw their maps and Texas became the first. Since then, new maps have materialized in half a dozen states controlled by both Republicans and Democrats, with more on the horizon, in the fight for Congress in November’s elections. Tennessee’s new map, if passed, would be the first directly responding to the high court ruling.
Under the map, Shelby County — which includes Memphis — is split into three districts. One district now runs along the state’s western border before extending down to include part of Williamson County, a suburban county just outside Nashville. Two other districts now share part of Shelby County and more rural, conservative communities in Tennessee.
“The Supreme Court has opined that redistricting, like the judicial system, should be colorblind — the decision indicated states like Tennessee can redistrict based on partisan politics,” Speaker Cameron Sexton said in a statement. “Tennessee’s redistricting will reduce the risk of future legal challenges while promoting sound and strategic conservatism.”
The General Assembly is expected to vote as soon as Thursday.
The Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that included two majority-Black districts, arguing that it violated the Constitution by using race as the primary factor in redistricting. The ruling has set off a scramble across Southern states with Republican leadership, all of which have at least one majority-Black district, before the 2026 midterms.
Louisiana last week delayed its House primaries — though thousands of absentee votes had already been cast — to allow its Legislature to draft a new map. The South Carolina legislature is also facing conservative pressure to quickly adopt a new congressional map.
Alabama is barred by court order from adopting a new map until after the 2030 census but is trying to get the order lifted. In anticipation of a favorable ruling, lawmakers convened a special session this week with the goal of allowing the state to delay certain House primaries.
In Florida, debate over a new map that could give Republicans up to four new seats was underway as the Supreme Court ruling became public.
Mr. Trump spoke directly to Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee, a Republican, to press for a new map the day after the ruling, and top Tennessee Republicans have raced to ease the way for rapid passage.
To do so, the legislature must first repeal a state law banning redistricting between census years each decade.
Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the State Capitol on Tuesday to voice opposition to a new map. Once inside, their chants and boos reverberated around the halls of the building. (On Tuesday, the House approved a strict rules package, which bans anyone removed from the gallery or committees for disorderly conduct from returning for the remainder of the session.)
“History will not look back kindly on you when you had an opportunity to do what was right and you chose to do something else,” said State Senator Raumesh Akbari, a Memphis Democrat, who delivered an emotional plea to Republican colleagues on Tuesday.
The Ninth Congressional District seat is currently held by Representative Steve Cohen, a white Democrat who has repeatedly maintained the support of many Black voters since he first won the seat in 2007. He is facing a Black primary challenger, State Representative Justin J. Pearson; both men joined a rally against the new map on Tuesday.
The new map is likely to scramble existing congressional races, including the one between Mr. Cohen and Mr. Pearson. Under the proposed map, the proposed Ninth Congressional District would stretch much farther east along the Tennessee border with Mississippi.
It was not immediately clear whether every Republican would support the map, but given the party’s supermajority, some amount of defection will not matter.
The map also affects Middle Tennessee, where the legislature had already split the Democratic stronghold of Nashville among three Republican-leaning districts. The Fifth Congressional District, which is currently held by Representative Andy Ogles, a Republican, no longer contains parts of Davidson County, which encompasses Nashville.
Should a new map be passed and signed into law, a legal challenge is expected. The primary in Tennessee is currently scheduled for Aug. 6.
Leanne Abraham and Katherine Chui contributed reporting.
Pope Leo has said he has never supported nuclear weapons and that those who criticise him need to speak the truth, in response to Donald Trump’s latest tirade accusing him of “endangering a lot of Catholics” with his stance on the Iran war.
Speaking to journalists on Tuesday night after leaving the papal retreat in Castel Gandolfo, near Rome, the first US-born pontiff said: “The mission of the church is to preach the gospel, to preach peace.”
Leo, who is to meet the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, in the Vatican on Thursday in an effort to ease tensions sparked by previous Trump broadsides, made a plea for honesty in political debate.
“If anyone wants to criticise me for proclaiming the gospel, let them do so with the truth: the church has spoken out against all nuclear weapons for years, there is no doubt about that,” the pope said. “I simply hope to be listened to because of the value of God’s word.”
Earlier in the day, Trump told Hugh Hewitt, a prominent conservative radio talkshow host: “The pope would rather talk about the fact that it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and I don’t think that’s very good.
“I think he’s endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people. But I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
In April, the US president lashed out at Leo in response to the pope’s criticisms of the war on Iran, calling Leo “weak on crime” and “terrible on foreign policy” and saying he had only been elected pontiff because Trump himself was in the White House. Trump then shared an AI-generated image of himself depicted as a Christ-like figure before deleting it.
Leo, who marks his first year as pope on Friday, often goes to Castel Gandolfo at the start of the week, leaving on a Tuesday night and on some occasions stopping to chat to journalists. But until Trump’s latest tirade against him, he had not been planning to speak this week.
“We were told yesterday that there would be no papal chat,” said Andrea Vreede, a Vatican correspondent for the Dutch public radio and TV network NOS. “But there was, because he thought it was necessary and it was necessary.”
Vreede added: “Things have become really tense because Trump isn’t talking about the church or Vatican, but Leo; he has made it personal. We’re back to the middle ages when holy Roman emperors and popes did this kind of [thing], used this kind of language.”
The Rubio meeting will be the first known private audience Leo has had with a member of Trump’s cabinet since the secretary of state and the US vice-president, JD Vance, met the pope a day after his papal inauguration mass in May last year.
A “frank” conversation is expected, the US ambassador to the Holy See, Brian Burch, said, although Rubio has played down the rift between Trump administration and the Vatican, saying “obviously we had some stuff that happened” but there was “a lot to talk about with the Vatican”.
On Friday, Rubio will also meet the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, whom Trump berated in April after she criticised his remarks against Leo. The president lambasted the Meloni government for not supporting the strikes on Iran and threatening to withdraw US troops from Italy as a result.
But Rubio’s meeting with the pope, which the US secretary of state has been seeking for weeks, could have an ulterior motive, said Vreede.
“For Leo, it’s important to have a photo moment with Rubio and then release a short statement saying they are continuing their dialogue and all want world peace,” she said. “Privately, it won’t be a nice talk, it cannot be a nice talk … but Rubio needs to keep the diplomatic channels with the Vatican open as he’s thinking about himself [ahead of the US presidential elections] in 2028.”
Trump’s rivalry with Rubio possibly triggered his latest outburst, Vreede added: “He believes in rivalry, in winning … perhaps he’s trying to interfere with Rubio because Rubio is being a bit too diplomatic.”
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