Tim Koleto has stood on an Olympic podium, worn the colors of four different nations, and skated a “Ghostbusters” routine in front of a World Championship crowd. But the moment that took him longest to talk about happened in a living room in Colorado Springs, when he was 21, and nobody was watching.
The ice dancer, who won team silver for Japan at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, was preparing to leave home for Michigan to start a new chapter in his career. Before he left, he was sent to see a family friend for what he understood would be a friendly send-off.
“I was told, ‘They’re going to pray over you, bang the champagne against the ship, and then you go off into the sunset,” Koleto told Outsports of the 2013 visit.
It was not a send-off. The woman told him, he says, that he had “a homosexual target on your back,” then summoned her husband, a priest, and the two laid hands on him to “pray it out” before sending him on his way. Raised in an evangelical community where adults routinely claimed prayer could counteract being gay, Koleto didn’t have a name for it. “I’d been programmed in my religion that this is wrong and impure, something that needs to be prayed away, like a perversion,” he said. He buried it and went back to training.
The detour that became a career
If Koleto’s personal road was circuitous, so was his athletic one. He came up as a singles skater before a string of serious injuries pushed him toward ice dance. From there, the map gets unusual: he competed for the United States, then South Korea, then became Norway’s first-ever ice dancing team with partner Thea Rabe, before finding lasting chemistry with Misato Komatsubara and ultimately representing Japan, where he naturalized as a citizen in 2020.
He and Komatsubara, who later married, reached their first World Championships together in 2019 and qualified for Beijing. Their 2021-22 rhythm dance was a disco medley featuring Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” A doping controversy in the team event delayed their medal ceremony until the 2024 Paris Games, meaning the Eiffel Tower, not Beijing, formed the backdrop when they finally received their silver, a moment Koleto calls “the pinnacle” of his career.
A therapist’s question changed everything
The Colorado memory came back during pre-Beijing sessions with a psychotherapist in Montreal, where Koleto still lives. He mentioned the couple almost in passing. His therapist’s reply landed differently: How did it feel to go through conversion therapy?
“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.”
The reframing helped push him to come out publicly as bisexual at the start of Pride Month in 2023, already out privately to family, friends, and his then-wife, but aware, as he put it, that “there are a lot of kids who have been through something similar.”
The scale backs him up. A 2024 estimate from UCLA’s Williams Institute puts the number of U.S. LGBTQ adults who have undergone conversion therapy at roughly 700,000, about half as adolescents. The American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Medical Association all reject the practice as ineffective and link it to depression, anxiety, and elevated suicide risk.
It remains a live legal fight. In March 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Colorado’s 2019 ban on conversion therapy for minors, returning the case to the lower courts; Colorado lawmakers have since advanced a bill letting survivors sue practitioners, which awaits Gov. Jared Polis’s decision. Most U.S. states still have no full ban on minors.
Why an athlete’s visibility matters
For Koleto, that’s exactly why out athletes count. “Maybe they’re skaters going to the rink and feel like they don’t fit in. They’re not that feminine, but they’re not that macho or masculine either,” he said. “It would have been nice when I was that kid in Colorado Springs, feeling confused and left out, to have had someone to look at and feel some sense of representation.”
He’s used that visibility pointedly. As detailed in a February 2026 interview with the newsletter Out of Your League, Koleto publicly supported Skate Canada’s decision to pull events from Alberta after the province restricted trans women’s participation in women’s sports, and pushed back on efforts within the queer community to trade away trans acceptance for “more ‘culturally palatable’ queer identities.” He’s also become one of the only out bisexual men in elite sport willing to talk openly about biphobia.
His coming out produced one unscripted moment he didn’t see coming. After a group call home, his older sister called back alone, in tears, and came out to him. “She says, ‘I’m so sorry I wasn’t brave enough to tell you sooner.’ And it was a beautiful moment in both of our lives,” he said. His family, including a still-deeply religious father, has largely come through. “I’m quite lucky.” Researchers would agree that luck matters here: the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State has found family acceptance to be one of the strongest protective factors for LGBTQ youth, with rejection tied to sharply higher rates of depression and suicide attempts.
Retired from competition since 2025, Koleto now performs, coaches, is writing a novel, and, he notes with a grin, is in his first relationship with a boyfriend. He’d rather be a signpost than a cautionary tale. The skater who once got prayed over on his way out of town didn’t have anyone to look up to. He intends to be that person for the next kid at the rink.
