In Lake Placid, a pair of athletes are sliding for Ukraine. They hope better days are ahead

The final race of the headfirst-sliding sport known as skeleton awaits Ukrainian skeleton athletes Vladyslav Heraskevych and Yaroslav Lavreniuk. After that, they're going home.

They don't know what awaits when they get there.

Heraskevych and Lavreniuk are the only athletes from Ukraine competing at the world bobsleigh and skeleton championships that start Thursday and run through next weekend in Lake Placid, N.Y. The house they're sharing for a few more days is easy enough to find; it's the one with a giant Ukrainian flag hanging off the porch.

And as a war rages on in their homeland — with tensions right now between Ukraine and the U.S. as high as they've been since the Russian invasion three years ago — Heraskevych and Lavreniuk are hoping that just being able to compete and wear their nation's flag on the world stage brings some moment of joy to the people at home who are able to see it.

"I think every one of us lost some friends at this point," Heraskevych, who is bidding to compete in his third Olympics next year, said in an interview with The Associated Press. "My classmate was killed by a rocket and it's really hard. And my relatives are in Ukraine. Every hour, every minute, every alarm, they're in a big risk to be killed. We have this every day."

It has been three years of this, and in recent days the situation has seemed even more dire to Heraskevych and Lavreniuk. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was involved in an Oval Office blowup with U.S. President Donald Trump last week; Zelenskyy, in a social media post Tuesday, said that scene was "regrettable" and appealed to Trump by saying his "strong leadership" could help bring peace.

The U.S. has been Ukraine's biggest military backer since Russia's