Dmitry Feld, a Lake Placid resident and Kyiv, Ukraine native, holds a Ukrainian-style summer beet soup with Narayan Bosco at the St. Agnes Church benefit dinner for Ukraine on April 8, 2022. Bosco was serving soup to people in the St. Agnes School cafeteria. There was Ukrainian music playing, a blue and yellow candle burning in support of Ukraine and a donation pot that was filling with offerings that will directly support an orphanage in Kyiv. (Enterprise photo — Lauren Yates)

LAKE PLACID — Lake Placid community leader and USA Luge Marketing Manager Dmitry Feld has passed away following a battle with leukemia, his coworkers at USA Luge confirmed Wednesday afternoon. He was 68.

USA Luge CEO Jim Leahy said in an email to the Lake Placid News Wednesday that Feld took ill during the Christmas holidays.

“The leukemia that had been in remission for a couple of years reared it heads again,” Leahy wrote. “He was really struggling during this time with his breathing. In the last couple of days he developed RSV and pneumonia. He was intubated last night with the hope of improving his breathing.”

Feld’s coworker Gordy Sheer said he was admitted to the Adirondack Medical Center in Saranac Lake before being transported to the UVM Medical Center in Burlington.

“We are all shocked at this time,” Leahy wrote. “May this wonderful man rest in peace. Please keep his wife Linda and son Dima in your thoughts and prayers.”

Feld was the president of the Shipman Youth Center board and co-organizer of the annual I Love BBQ and Music Festival.

He was born during the Cold War, on Oct. 2, 1955 on the Kamchatka Peninsula in far-east Russia. His father was an administrator at an air force base.

“I am a product of a Soviet military family,” Feld told the Lake Placid News in 2014 after Russian invaded the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. “My father was part of the Soviet air force defense system.”

When Feld was about 3 years old, his family moved to Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania for a couple of years before moving to Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. Both countries were Soviet republics before declaring independence in 1990 and 1991, respectively. Feld’s parents divorced when he was about 7 or 8 years old. His father remarried, and he was raised by his mother.

Feld moved from the Republic of Ukraine to New York City in 1979. He moved to Lake Placid in 1984 when USA Luge hired him as a coach. He worked there until 2001, when he took a job with the U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton Federation before coming back to USA Luge five years later.

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This is a breaking news story. More details will be added to this story as they become available.