The first look at the schedule for the 2028 Paralympic Games was released Wednesday by the LA28 organizing committee, 1,000 days before the Aug. 15, 2028 opening ceremony at SoFi Stadium.
The closing ceremony will be held Aug. 27 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. In between, there will be 294 sessions and 560 medal events in 23 sports.
The schedule was developed in “close collaboration” with each sport’s international federation and Olympic Broadcasting Services with “the support” of the International Paralympic Committee, according to LA 28.
The first medal events will be held on Aug. 16 in track and field, wheelchair fencing, shooting, equestrian and cycling.
Like in the Olympics, competition will begin before the opening ceremony, with rugby games on Aug. 13 and boccia games on Aug. 14.
Boccia is one of two sports on the Paralympic program that does not have an equivalent on the Olympic program. It is similar to curling with players throwing or rolling leather balls as close as they can to a small ball called a jack.
Climbing will make its Paralympic debut Aug. 24.
The last day of the games will have finals in blind soccer, track and field, badminton, climbing, powerlifting, sitting volleyball and wheelchair basketball. A more detailed schedule will be released in 2026.
Downloadable PDFs of the Paralympic competition schedule by day and by session are available at LA28.org.
All events and sessions are subject to change leading up to the 2028 Games and until the end of the international competition, LA28 officials noted.
The Paralympics are held every four years. They were first held in Rome in 1960. This will be the first time they have been held in Los Angeles under the rule that went into effect in 1988 requiring the Games to be held in the same city and venues as the Olympic Games.
When the Olympics were last held in Los Angeles in 1984, the Paralympics were split between Nassau County in New York, where events for wheelchair and ambulatory athletes with cerebral palsy, amputees or athletes who blind or visually impaired athletes and Stoke Mandeville, England, where events for wheelchair athletes with spinal cord injuries were held.
The other Paralympic sport with no Olympic equivalent is goalball, which is played exclusively by athletes who are blind or vision impaired. It was invented in 1946 to help rehabilitate veterans who lost their sight during World War II.
Each team has three players, wearing eyeshades to ensure fairness, playing on an indoor court the same size as a volleyball court.
A ball with bells embedded inside allows athletes to hear where it is, and the crowd must be silent for the duration of play.
Teams take turns rolling the ball toward the opposing goal while the defending team’s players act as goalkeepers.