Paralympics (3)

The Paralympic athletes who do biathlon also do cross country, although the commentator suspects that by 2018, things might change, and athletes will do one or the other.  In the meantime, they hardly have any days off.  The times are adjusted based on (simply put) the reason they are sitting. For example, someone with spinal injuries at a level that leaves the ab muscles with less innervation is at a disadvantage, so some compensating factor is calculated with the raw time.  That's simpler than it actually is, but I don't know the intricate formulae.  From what the commentator said, the implication is that an amputee with full use of strong abs would be fastest, other things aside.  ("legs get in the way," she said). It would be expected that the ski chairs (whatever one calls them) would be varied, because of the lower body differences, but they are additionally customized by each athlete.  A couple of them looked almost homemade, but I'm sure that's not true. The skis are fixed in place, so if someone takes a corner sharply, they fall.  This is used on purpose for the biathlon - when it's time to lie prone to shoot, most of them just flop over sideways (with control) - they stay strapped into the ski chair, so their torsos are twisted a bit in many cases. Then they push themselves back up and head out again.   Most of the competitors use a double pole technique, but some were poling left-right-left-right instead.  At the final bit of the 15K  race, the Ukrainian guy had only one pole. What the heck?  They were being given nutrition and water regularly along the route - surely someone could have replaced a broken pole, although maybe it broke near the end.  During the regular Olympics I saw a racer being handed a replacement pole.     Due to the warm weather at the time of the 15K, they did 5 laps of the 3KM course instead of 3 laps of the 5KM course, as originally planned.  This seems backwards to me - wouldn't that make conditions even slushier?  Some of the US racers were in t-shirts and singlets instead of the long-sleeved outfits, but the Russian winners all had on long sleeves.  Possibly irrelevant.