Mark Kendall Bingham Memorial Tournament

The Mark Kendall Bingham Memorial Tournament or the Bingham Cup is a biennial international, non-professional, gay rugby union tournament, first held in 2002. It is named after Mark Bingham, who died on board United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed during the September 11, 2001 attacks .

The most recent tournament was held in Nashville, Tennessee, in May 2016.

In 2002, gay and bisexual rugby union teams worldwide founded the International Gay Rugby Association and Board (IGRAB) as a body to promote rugby union as an all-inclusive non-discriminatory sport which everyone can play, regardless of sexuality.

An informal invitational tournament, held in May 2001, was formally inaugurated by IGRAB as a new international rugby union competition — a gay rugby union world cup — which in a unanimous decision by all the members of IGRAB became known as the Bingham Cup.

The tournament was named after Mark Bingham, a former University of California, Berkeley rugby star who had played in the May 2001 tournament for San Francisco Fog RFC and cofounded the Gotham Knights RFC. Bingham died in the September 11, 2001 attacks on board United Airlines Flight 93. According to Jon Barrett of The Advocate, he is generally accepted to be one of a group of passengers who fought with the hijackers aboard the flight, which eventually led to the hijackers crashing the plane into a vacant field in Pennsylvania instead of targets in Washington, D.C.. At the time of his death, there were around eight gay-inclusive rugby clubs worldwide, and he was helping to create others.

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