Tim Koleto sat in a Montreal therapist's office four years ago and suddenly recognized the moment that had haunted his childhood. At 21, just before leaving Colorado Springs to pursue ice dancing in Michigan, he'd been taken to meet a family friend—a woman who, he now understands, subjected him to conversion therapy. She'd looked at him and said, "You have a homosexual target on your back." Then her husband, a priest, arrived. Together, they laid hands on him and prayed to remake who he was.
For over a decade, Koleto had filed the encounter away, burying it beneath the weight of achievement. He became an Olympic silver medalist, a national champion, a World Championships competitor. But when his therapist asked, "How did it feel to go through conversion therapy?" something shifted. "My therapist said what happened to me would be illegal in Canada," Koleto recalls. "I had never perceived it before as conversion therapy, and that stuck with me for a while."
That recognition became the catalyst for his public coming out in 2023. Koleto had been out privately to family and friends for years, but he chose visibility for a reason that transcends his own story: there are children still trapped in the same silence he endured.
The scale of the problem is staggering. A study by the Williams Institute found that nearly 700,000 LGBTQ adults in the U.S. have received conversion therapy at some point in their lives, with around 350,000 subjected to it as adolescents. Yet the legal landscape remains fragmented. Most states have not fully banned the practice for minors, and in March 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against a 2019 Colorado law banning conversion therapy, sending it back to lower courts. In response, local LGBTQ organizations have rallied behind a new bill that would allow survivors to privately sue practitioners—legislation that has been approved by Colorado lawmakers and awaits the governor's signature.
Koleto's openness carries particular weight in sports, where silence remains the default. When he posted on Instagram at the start of Pride Month three years ago about being bisexual, it was newsworthy precisely because so few elite male athletes have done so. While a recent Gallup survey found that 1 in 20 U.S. adults now identify as bisexual, very few prominent male Olympic athletes—active or retired—have publicly claimed that identity.
His childhood in an evangelical church community made the stakes feel impossible. "I'd been programmed in my religion that this is wrong and impure, something that needs to be prayed away, like a perversion," he says. The idea that prayer could erase homosexuality wasn't fringe theology where he grew up—it was ordinary. Adults whispered about it. Families believed it. Children internalized it.
Now retired from competitive ice dancing, Koleto leans into a different kind of performance: the quiet power of visibility. "Maybe they're skaters going to the rink and feel like they don't fit in," he reflects. "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." That is the legacy he's building now—not medals, but mirrors for kids who need to see themselves reflected in someone who made it through.