Mark Bellissimo

As the American business tycoon prepares to host the 2018 World Equestrian Games, Madeleine Silver heads to North Carolina to talk million-dollar projects and why the equestrian world needs a shake-up

- Madeleine Silver

“WHAT you’re looking at here is the ballroom,” says businessman Mark Bellissimo, pointing to a vast expanse of flattened mud — and a digger in action.

As far as the World Equestrian Games (WEG) go, ballrooms, we imagine, are fairly low priority. But then so are infinity pools, five star hotels and spas, all of which were sketched out by Mark on the back of a piece of paper — “My daughter has kept them and calls them the Markhives!” — and are now swiftly swinging into production.

“We want this to be, literally, an almost Disney-like experience,” he says, surveying the 1,600 acres at Tryon International Equestrian Center in North Carolina that he bought in January 2014 with his wife Katherine and five other families.

Dressed in a crisp open-collar shirt, preppy loafers and a white cap brandishing the Tryon logo, he is everything you’d expect from a likeable cartoon character of an American entrepreneur. Thanks to success during the dotcom era, as well as in the health and manufacturing industries, he has hit the big time, having had a modest upbringing — something he is keen to emphasise.

Conversations are littered with talk of his “vision”, “community” and “you’re kidding?” — the latter when he finds out we haven’t yet been shown the latest cluster of cabins to help accommodate the expected 500,000 spectators at the games.

“WHEN we went to build this originally, our vision was to create an equestrian lifestyle destination,” he says — a process that began by moving three million square foot of earth, where there was once just a bankrupt golf course and rolling hills.

What did the locals make of what is, if horses are not your priority, something of a blot on the landscape at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains?