Some athletes win medals, and then some athletes carry something extra with them to every competition — something the scoreboard can’t measure. Tim Koleto is the second kind.
The ice dancer won team silver for Japan at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. He competed for four different countries. He performed a “Ghostbusters” number at a World Championship. But the moment that took longest to surface, the one he kept folded away for years, happened in a private home in Colorado Springs in 2013. He was 21. No audience. No scores. Just him, a family friend, a priest, and a prayer that he didn’t have a name for.
Koleto had been getting ready to leave home for Michigan. He was told he’d be going to see a family friend for a quick, warm send-off — in his words, they would “bang the champagne against the ship” and wish him well. Instead, the woman told him he had “a homosexual target on your back,” called in her husband, a priest, and the two laid hands on him and prayed. Growing up in an evangelical household where this kind of intervention was treated as routine, Koleto didn’t clock it as anything other than another piece of religious conditioning. “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 tucked it away and went back to skating.
His path through the sport was as winding as his path to understanding what had happened to him. Injuries pushed him out of singles skating and into ice dance. He represented the U.S., then South Korea, and then partnered with Thea Rabe to become Norway’s first ice dance entry. Later, he and Misato Komatsubara clicked both athletically and personally — the two eventually married. They represented Japan, reached the 2019 World Championships, and qualified for Beijing 2022. A doping controversy in the team event held up the medal ceremony until the 2024 Paris Olympics, where they finally stood under the Eiffel Tower to collect their silver. Koleto calls it “the pinnacle.”
The Colorado memory resurfaced years later, in a therapist’s office in Montreal. He mentioned the couple almost as a side note. His therapist asked how it felt to have gone through conversion therapy. The question landed like a door opening. Is conversion true for families? His therapist was clear: what had happened to him would have been illegal in Canada. That was the moment, Koleto says, when things truly shifted. “I had never perceived it before as conversion therapy, and that stuck with me for a while.”
Is the question of conversion truth for families one worth sitting with? The medical establishment has answered it plainly and repeatedly. The American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Medical Association all condemn conversion therapy as both ineffective and harmful, tying it to depression, anxiety, and increased suicide risk. A 2024 estimate from UCLA’s Williams Institute found that around 700,000 U.S. LGBTQ adults have experienced it, with roughly half having done so as minors.
The legal landscape remains unsettled. In March 2026, the Supreme Court overturned Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors, sending it back through the courts. Colorado has since moved toward legislation that would allow survivors to sue practitioners directly, with the governor yet to sign.
Is the truth about conversion for families still a debate that affects real kids right now? Koleto says yes, and that’s why he went public as bisexual in June 2023. He had been out privately to the people around him for some time. Going public was about more than himself. “There are a lot of kids who have been through something similar,” he said.
Coming out had an unexpected chapter of its own. After a group call with family, his older sister phoned him back alone, crying, and came out to him. “She says, ‘I’m so sorry I wasn’t brave enough to tell you sooner,'” Koleto recalled. “And it was a beautiful moment in both of our lives.” His father, still religious, has largely stayed close.
Now retired from competition since 2025, Koleto coaches, performs, and is writing a novel. Is conversion truth for families the banner he skates under now? Not exactly. But the kid who once left a Colorado Springs living room without knowing what had been done to him has made sure that the next one will at least know they are not alone.
