The Paralympic Games begin Friday — here's what to know

This is an excerpt from The Buzzer, CBC Sports' daily email newsletter. Get up to speed on what's happening in sports by subscribing here .

The Milan-Cortina Paralympic Winter Games officially begin on Friday with the opening ceremony at Verona Arena, the 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheatre that hosted the Olympic closing ceremony a couple weeks ago. Here are a few things to know about the 50th-anniversary edition of the Winter Paralympics:

Similar to last month's Winter Olympics, the Paralympics are being staged across a geographically widespread area in northern Italy. Cortina d'Ampezzo hosts the alpine skiing, snowboarding and wheelchair curling events while nordic skiing (the blanket name for cross-country and biathlon) takes place in Tesero. Milan's Santagiulia arena has been refitted for Para hockey, in which players get around the ice on bladed sleds, using two short hockey sticks with picks on the butt end to propel themselves.

With only six sports on the program, the Winter Paralympics are a lot more compact than the Olympics. Among the sports you won't see here are figure skating, speed skating, freestyle skiing and the sliding sports (bobsleigh, skeleton and luge), and there are just nine days of medal events, compared to 16 at the Olympics. These Games will feature 665 athletes and 79 sets of medals, which are both all-time highs for the Winter Paralympics but still sit well below the Olympics' 2,900 athletes and 116 medal events.

Sixty-eight of the 79 Paralympic medal events are in the various skiing disciplines, which each include a standing, sitting and visually impaired category for both men and women. Another eight sets of medals will be awarded in snowboarding, where athletes are classified