Biography | Mark Bullingham — He Sold a Wing-Sailed Cup Onto San Francisco Bay

In 2011 Mark Bullingham was Director of Marketing for the America's Cup Event Authority, the commercial body standing next to Larry Ellison's Oracle Racing defence.

The job sat in San Francisco just as the city won the right to host the 34th America's Cup.

The announcement came on 31 December 2010, after last-ditch talks with Newport and an Italian bid.

San Francisco would stage the 2013 match on the Bay in 72-foot wing-sailed catamarans, the first American hosting since 1995.

ACEA's early San Francisco office was downtown at 160 Pacific Avenue.

By the summer of 2012 the operation would move onto the waterfront, with Pier 27 becoming America's Cup Park and the public face of the event.

Bullingham's brief was not the sailing. It was the sale.

The Event Authority had to turn a historic yacht race into a broadcast product and a sponsorship book large enough to carry a multi-year festival on the Embarcadero.

He left that role in 2011 for Fuse Sports and Entertainment in Europe, where he spent five years growing an agency from a small team to more than two hundred people across seventeen offices.

The Bay remained the place where his sports-marketing career first met a global venue.

Pier 27 is still a working cruise terminal. The America's Cup village is gone.

What stays is the geometry he was hired to sell: a racecourse framed by the Golden Gate, Alcatraz, and a city that could watch from the shore.

Companies House later recorded his birth month as November 1974. Public profiles list an MBA in international marketing from ESLSCA in Paris.

The America's Cup year is the first moment that can be pinned to a public waterfront rather than a private office.

Photo: Gianluca Cogoli, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons