‘I decided that at the Olympics you’re given a platform and it really didn’t matter to me what other people would think about me speaking up,” says Adam Rippon. “I didn’t even hesitate.”

The figure skater burst into the public consciousness earlier this year for two reasons. The first was a dispute with US vice-president Mike Pence. Rippon is thought to be the first openly gay athlete ever to qualify for a US Winter Olympics squad, and ahead of this year’s Games, he was interviewed by USA Today. The reporter asked him what he thought about Pence leading the country’s delegation to South Korea. “You mean Mike Pence, the same Mike Pence that funded gay conversion therapy?” Rippon said. “I’m not buying it.” He added that he would prefer not to meet Pence before the opening ceremonies. (Pence has denied the accusations.)

The second reason for Rippon’s fame, of course, is his performances at the games. His expressive free skate to O by Coldplay helped seal the bronze for the US in the team event, winning fans around the world. At 28, he is, he says, “one of the oldest first-time Olympians since 1932”, and, as a result perhaps, his skating didn’t quite reach the technical heights of his teenage rivals. But he skated cleanly and with an artistry all too rare in an era where the top skaters pack their programmes with quadruple jumps.

His interviews and comments on social media made him a star. As the Pence backlash unfurled, and Rippon prepared for his first skate, he wrote on Twitter, to all those who had been saying they hoped he failed: “I have failed many times ... and now I’m a glamazon bitch ready for the runway.” After the competition began, a sports reporter asked him to explain the fact that, at 28, he was skating better than ever. “I can’t explain witchcraft,” he replied. When Donald Trump Jr weighed in on Twitter regarding the Pence dispute, Rippon kept his response oblique and witty: “With everything going on in the media about me this Valentine’s Day,” he wrote, “I don’t want people to get distracted and forget how beautiful I am (on the outside).”

Today, Rippon is as outspoken and unapologetic as ever regarding the Trump administration. “You know, there’s often that picture of Donald Trump holding the pride flag and it says LGBTQ for Trump,” he says. “But it’s written on a flag that he’s holding upside down. That’s the perfect picture to represent what he’s done for LGBTQ people, which is nothing ... He’s tried to ban trans people from serving in the military for very silly reasons, saying that they’re a financial burden, when it costs way less to help a trans person within the military than it does to supply Viagra to other people within the military.

Rippon competes at the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

“He’s just not a friend to the LGBTQ community, especially with the pushback with these religious freedom laws, which give different companies the right and the permission to discriminate based on sexual orientation, which is wrong. I think that right now it’s more important than ever to speak up, especially for people – especially for trans people – who are being denied different services at different companies based on these ‘religious freedoms’.”

Rippon is one of many high-profile US athletes, including LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Lindsey Vonn, who have suffered major backlashes for sharing their political views, and refusing to “stick to sports”. In April, he was one of the 60 Olympians who boycotted the Team USA meeting with Trump at the White House, explaining that he wouldn’t engage with an administration that “discriminates against those who are different”.

Did the backlash worry him? “I think that sometimes it can be scary, to be honest, but I spoke from the heart and I always speak from the heart ... I got a lot more [backlash] than I was ever expecting and still do to this day, and often, but it means nothing to me, because it’s more important to me to speak up. Different gay people have done so much and gone out of their way to help other people and made life for someone like me so much easier. I feel like I owe it to them and I owe it to those young kids to speak up.”

It has been three months since Rippon returned to the US, to a whirlwind new existence. In that time he has won ABC’s Dancing With the Stars, made a raft of TV appearances and done photo shoots with Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar and Rolling Stone. He has spent evenings with Reese Witherspoon at the Oscars and Britney Spears at the Glaad Media Awards when not collecting plaudits, including a spot in People’s Most Beautiful issue. At the Academy Awards, he arrived on the red carpet in a BDSM-inspired tuxedo with a leather harness; Cher wrote about this in Time magazine, when Rippon appeared on its list of the world’s 100 most influential people. “He has humility, grace and an incredible sense of humour,” she wrote, adding that his leather harness showed: “He dares to be different in a world where being different always comes with a cost.”

The last night he spent at his Los Angeles home was before he left for the Olympics, and he now often only gets three hours sleep a night, but the 28-year-old is here for it.

On Dancing With the Stars with partner Jenna Johnson. Photograph: Kelsey McNeal/ABC via Getty Images

“I kind of feel used to it,” says Rippon of his fame. “In a weird way I feel like I’ve been prepared for it to happen my whole life.”

To those who only watch winter sports every four years, Rippon is an overnight sensation. But he has long been familiar to the small, dedicated audience that follows the sport. The oldest of six children from a small Pennsylvania town, Rippon fell for skating after attending a birthday party at an ice rink when he was 10. His mother bought him skates and signed him up for group lessons, but he progressed so rapidly that she soon sought out a professional instructor. He was earmarked for stardom more than a decade ago, when he captured the first of two consecutive junior world championships, but he struggled early at the senior level and failed to make the US team for the 2010 Vancouver or 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

He believes being closeted held him back. While figure skating has a gay-friendly reputation, a long line of US competitors, including Olympic gold medalist Brian Boitano, and two-time Olympian Johnny Weir, didn’t publicly come out until after their competitive careers.

At 24, after a disastrous eighth-place finish in the 2014 US national championships, he felt lost. He had already come out to his family and friends, but suddenly realised speaking about his sexuality was essential. “Rock bottom,” he says. “That pushed me to do things differently, to do things that I thought were important. To do things that I wanted to do and not worry about pleasing the judges.” There were concerns that declaring his sexuality could harm his competition scores. “People around me were a little worried [about the judging],” he recalls. “I think my mom was a little worried. But it didn’t really matter to me, because I felt like if that was going to be the thing that didn’t make me successful, then fuck it. If that was really something that bothered someone so much, then they had serious problems.”

He came out publicly in an interview with Skating magazine in 2015, with the full support of US figure skating. Then he traded in his awkward image and curly hair, replacing it with the perfectly sculpted look of today. In 2016, he won the US national championship (“I’m like a witch!” he said afterwards, “You can’t kill me!”). And not even a broken left foot last year could keep him from a spot on the squad for South Korea in January.

There is a big difference between skating-famous and Rippon’s crossover stardom. He laughs at the internet gossip about a supposed feud with Tonya Harding behind the scenes of Dancing With the Stars – “She was honestly really nice to me,” he says – and at an item in the New York Post, reporting that he is moving in with Finnish boyfriend Jussi-Pekka Kajaala, whom he met on Tinder during a competition last year in Helsinki.

Rippon celebrates at the end of his program in the men’s figure skating short program at PyeongChang. Photograph: Canadian Press/REX/Shutterstock

“I always think it’s so funny that somebody like me could kind of catch on, especially now,” he says. “I think I’m just not who you typically would think would be a star from the Olympics.” His most important work, he says, has been with the Trevor Project, which provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to young LGBTQ people. “I asked myself: what did I want to do? How can I help other people?” he says. “And it makes me think about the people who have come before me, what they’ve gone through. I got to have this amazing conversation with Billie Jean King and she told me about when she was outed, how her career suffered and spiralled out of control. And so I thought, if I’m given this platform and I can get to engage with so many people, what can I do to help other people so that they don’t need to go through what I went through as a kid?

“I think that there is somewhat of a stigma that [suggests] if you are a figure skater, you’re just gay anyway,” he says. “As a kid I got teased for being gay just because I was a skater, before I even knew what being gay was ... I think that there are a lot of people that are afraid for their sons, or boys who are afraid to get into skating because they don’t want to get made fun of or teased. That pushes a lot of people from sharing that they’re gay.

“I don’t think anybody has a responsibility [to come out]. There’s no such thing. I think it’s completely up to the individual themselves and the timing and whatever. For me, it was important to be out and competing at the same time.” Rippon has not formally retired from competitive skating but it often sounds as if he has. In many ways the sport has moved on from him thanks to a growing emphasis on technical elements. The hyper-athletic quadruple jumps absent from Rippon’s repertoire – but common in the quivers of top-flight skaters such as two-time Olympic gold medalist Yuzuru Hanyu – will make it all but impossible for him to reach the podium at major competitions under an overhauled judging system that some critics say has reduced the sport to a jumping contest. “Somebody like me is from a different era,” he says, with a little wistfulness but no obvious regrets. He has already decided to sit out the Grand Prix series this autumn and, while he has left the door open for the world championships in March, he admits he has given no thought to musical decisions or costuming choices for the upcoming season. The ultimate goal, it seems, is to reach a place in US life where his Olympic history is secondary to something bigger.

“The best piece of advice I ever received was: What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” he says. “When I got older, I think I really started to process what that meant to me, and I think it meant: head into every situation and give yourself a chance. Don’t be afraid to fail.”