Welcome to Mark Allen Sports
Mark Allen Sports is a company of two: Mark Allen and CEO Scott Zagarino.
About Scott Zagarino, CEO
Scott is the CEO of Mark Allen Sports. Scott was born in FT Worth, Texas and grew uo in Miami Florida sailing Olympic class sailboats. He also qualified for the USA Junior Olympic Trials in wrestling. He moved to Ocean Racing sailboats when he moved to California winning class as the skipper of Black Swan in the St Francis Yacht Club Big Boat Series.
From there he moved into the sport of triathlon where he qualified for the Age Group World Championship team, ran a 10:19 at the Ironman.
Scott founded the first non-endemic sponsorship in Triathlon with the Pioneer Electronics Team, then founded CS Sports Marketing where he secured the largest sponsorship in Ironman history with Gatorade. Scott is responsible for bringing more than $9 million into the sport in sponsorship.
Scott was elected Vice-President of the Board Of Directors of the United States Triathlon Federation and was elected by the top triathletes in the world to forming a group to represent the interests of professional Triathletes worldwide. He was also voted the Athletes Representative to the International Olympic helping forward the sport of triathlon to the fastest inclusion for a new sport on the Olympic Program in history.
Scott was hired by Michael Milken to create a sports fundraising initiative for the Prostate Cancer Foundation. Titled “Athletes For A Cure,” the program was the most successful first year sports fundraising program in the history of nonprofits in the process pioneering the use of social media in fundraising by winning the Twitter award for best nonprofit content provider. He also founded the Sportsgrants Foundation which raised more than $8 million for Special Operations charities. He then worked with CrossFit foundation founder Greg Glassman to create the CrossFit Foundation.
He was ordained a Zen Buddhist monk after seven years of training.
Scott currently lives in Hood River, Oregon.
About Mark Allen
Mark Allen was born in Glendale, California. Growing up he was a competitive swimmer, which eventually lead to becoming an All-American at UC San Diego where he received a degree in biology.
After competing and losing in the IRONMAN World Championship six times (often to Dave Scott), Mark emerged victorious in 1989, winning one of the most difficult one-day sporting events in the world. It would be the first of six Ironman World Championship titles in Hawaii, the last coming in 1995 at age 37.
In 1989 Mark also won the International Triathlon Union’s inaugural World Championship at the Olympic distance in Avignon, France.
Mark was undefeated in ten trips to the Nice International Triathlon in France, and from 1988-1990 he put together a streak of 21 consecutive race wins at all distances of triathlons from the Olympic distance all the way up to Ironman.
Over the course of his racing career, which ended in 1996, he maintained a 90% average in top-three finishes. He was named “Triathlete of the Year” six times by Triathlete Magazine. In 1997 Outside magazine tabbed him “The World’s Fittest Man” and was also inducted into the Ironman Hall of Fame. His most recent honor came in 2012 when he was voted “The Greatest Endurance Athlete Of All Time” in a worldwide poll conducted by ESPN.