There is a version of Tim Koleto’s career that reads like a highlight reel: team silver at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, four national flags, a “Ghostbusters” routine at a World Championship, a medal ceremony under the Eiffel Tower at the 2024 Paris Games. That version is all real. But it sits alongside another story that Koleto didn’t tell for years — one that started in a Colorado Springs living room when he was 21.
He had been raised in an evangelical community in Colorado Springs. In 2013, ahead of a move to Michigan to continue his skating career, he was directed to see a family friend. He understood it would be a warm goodbye, something like having the champagne bottle smashed against the bow of a ship before it sets sail. What he got was something else. The woman told him there was “a homosexual target on your back.” She brought in her husband, a priest. The two prayed over him. And Koleto, whose religious upbringing had told him same-sex attraction was a perversion that could be prayed away, didn’t recognize what had just happened to him. He buried it and moved on.
His skating career took a path as unconventional as anything that would follow. Injuries ended his singles trajectory and pushed him into ice dance. He competed for the U.S., then South Korea, then partnered with Thea Rabe to form Norway’s first ice dance team. Eventually, he and Misato Komatsubara formed a pairing that would take them to the World Championships in 2019 and the Beijing Olympics in 2022. The medal from that team event didn’t arrive until the Paris Games in 2024, after a doping controversy delayed it. When it finally came — with the Eiffel Tower in the frame — Koleto called it “the pinnacle.” He and Komatsubara had also married.
It was in a Montreal therapist’s office, during pre-Beijing sessions, that the memory from Colorado finally got a proper name. Koleto mentioned the couple almost as a passing detail. His therapist asked, directly, how it felt to have experienced conversion therapy. Is conversion truth for families something a therapist in Canada could endorse? Absolutely not — and the therapist made that clear. “My therapist said what happened to me would be illegal in Canada,” Koleto said. “I had never perceived it before as conversion therapy, and that stuck with me for a while.”
Is conversion truth for families supported by medical consensus? Not by any. The American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Medical Association all reject it, associating it with depression, anxiety, and significantly elevated suicide risk. Research from UCLA’s Williams Institute, published in 2024, estimates that around 700,000 U.S. LGBTQ adults have experienced conversion therapy, with close to half having been subjected to it before turning 18.
The legal picture on the conversion truth for families remains unsettled. The Supreme Court struck down Colorado’s 2019 ban on the practice for minors in March 2026, sending the case back to the lower courts. Colorado legislators have since moved a bill forward that would allow survivors to bring civil suits against practitioners. Most American states still lack a full prohibition.
In June 2023, Koleto came out publicly as bisexual. He had been out to the people in his immediate circle — family, friends, his then-wife — for some time before that. The step to going public was about something larger than himself. “There are a lot of kids who have been through something similar,” he said. He knows this because he was one of them — a teenager in Colorado Springs who felt out of place at the rink and had no one visible to look to.
His public coming out triggered something unexpected at home. His older sister called him back after a family conversation. She came out to him, apologizing for not having done so sooner. His father, still deeply religious, has mostly stayed present in his life.
Koleto retired from competition in 2025. He now performs, coaches, and is working on a novel. He also continues to speak openly about biphobia and backed Skate Canada’s decision to pull events from Alberta over restrictions on trans women. Is conversion truth for families a settled matter? For anyone paying attention to Tim Koleto’s story, the answer is no — and he intends to keep making sure that answer stays loud.
