A former Antigua and Barbuda Olympian and longtime track coach, who used his status to abuse young boys, will spend what a judge said would be “probably a life sentence” after he pleaded guilty to 12 counts of indecent assault and battery on a child over 14 years.
In addition, Conrad Mainwaring, who was a hurdler for Antigua and Barbuda in the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, also pleaded guilty to four counts of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14. The charges involved nine male victims.
The Berkshire Superior Court was told that Mainwaring, a 72-year-old Los Angeles resident and United Kingdom national, sexually molested young boys at a sports camp in western Massachusetts in the 1970s. He faces up to 11 years in jail.
Judge John Agostini said it was “probably a life sentence” given Mainwaring’s age.
“He used his Olympic status to abuse young boys. He chose young, attractive, athletic boys, young men because he knew, at least he thought he knew, they would not speak up. This was his opportunity for self-gratification, a fraud at the expense of many, many lives,” District Attorney Timothy Shugrue told the court.”
Shugrue detailed case after case in which Mainwaring leveraged his Olympic credentials as part of a grooming technique used on boys attending Camp Greylock, making the youngsters believe that the sexual assault would make them better athletes. The abuse took place in the woods around the camp, in a van and near a tennis court among other places.
Mainwaring, who appeared on court in a wheelchair and wearing a mask, said “yes” when asked by the judge if he committed the offenses laid out in court. He then said “guilty” after each of the charges was read out. The court heard he molested campers from 1975 to 1979 while working as a counsellor at Camp Greylock in Becket.
Authorities have said they believe there are “many other victims” in several states and outside the United States.
Some of the camp victims, who were as young as 13 and as old as 19, testified at last Thursday’s hearing, and calling Mainwaring a danger to young men. They demanded a long jail sentence, arguing that he be kept away from boys or young men and barred from coaching.
“It’s beyond diabolical, the pain and suffering of so many. It’s why he must be put behind bars and be prevented from ever harming anyone again,” said John Shapiro, an entrepreneur and father of three, who told the court how he was abused at the Massachusetts camp and Syracuse University.
Attorney Michael Waxman detailed how he met Mainwaring 40 years ago at the camp and was “overjoyed” that Mainwaring had picked him and would have followed him to “the ends of the earth” to see the dream of becoming a top athlete.
Massachusetts authorities started investigating Mainwaring following a 2019 ESPN report in which more than 50 men alleged they were abused by him, some of them at Camp Greylock.
He was arrested in 2021 on a fugitive warrant as he left a Los Angeles County courthouse after a plea in a separate case from 2019.
Mainwaring also is accused in several lawsuits of abusing dozens of young men when he was a doctoral student, a deputy residency hall director and track and field coach at Syracuse University in the 1980s.
