Towards Beijing 2022: Discussion on the growth in size of Paralympic Winter Games in terms of participating data from Örnsköldvik 1976 to PyeongChang 2018

Paralympic Winter Games (PWG) born in 1976. Across Games, media personnel has increased suggesting an increase in PWG size. However, the growth of PWG from Örnsköldsvik 1976 to PyeongChang 2018 in terms of participating data has not been discussed. This work aims to find if the growth in media coverage comes together with an increase in PWG size in terms of National Paralympic Committee, sports, medal events, and athletes. The presence of trend over PWG editions is evaluated with Mann-Kendall Trend Test and differences among sports and continents with Kruskal Wallis test. Showing a significant monotonic trend, the number of countries (p < .001, β = 0.81) and the number of participating athletes (p < .001, β = 7.40) seem to be good indicators of PWG. These two indicators are good descriptors of PWG size because related to sociocultural and political aspects. In contrast, number of medal events being related to many factors did not show statistically significant trend (p = .95); therefore, this indicator seems to be less appropriate to describe PWG size. If the whole history is considered, slow but significant changes in number of sports (p < .001, β = 0.08) suggest this indicator could be considered in describing Games size