Charles Hewes Moore Jr. (August 12, 1929 – October 8, 2020) was an American track and field athlete, as well as a philanthropist, businessman, and champion of societal reform. Moore won a gold medal in the 400 metre hurdles in the 1952 Summer Olympics with a time of 50.8 seconds, narrowly missing the world record of 50.6 seconds. He had set the American record (50.7 seconds) during Olympic qualifying. He also ran the third leg of the second-place 4 × 400 metres relay at the Olympics. Moore finished second for the James E. Sullivan Award for top U.S. athlete in 1952, and was selected as one of "100 Golden Olympians" in 1996. In 1999, he was inducted into the United States National Track and Field Hall of Fame. Charles Moore, an Olympics athlete of track and field died on October 8, 2020, in Laporte, Pennsylvania. He was 91 years old.
Athletic achievements
Moore did not start his track and field career until attending Mercersburg Academy as a junior, where he was coached by Jimmy Curran, who recommended he try hurdling based on his father's success with the event. His father, Charles "Crip" Moore, Sr. was a hurdler who made the U.S. team as an alternate in the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris.
On July 21, 1952, at the XV Olympiad in Helsinki, Finland, Moore won a gold medal and set the Olympic record in the 400 metre hurdles. He also ran the third leg for the American team's 4 × 400 metre relay, which earned him a silver medal. The team's performance broke the standing world record by 4 seconds (3:04.0), but was not sufficient to secure the gold against Jamaica, who ran the race in 3:03.9.
Moore was inducted into Cornell University's inaugural Athletics Hall of Fame in 1978. The Charles H. Moore Outstanding Senior Varsity Athlete Award at Cornell is named for him. From 1994 to 1999, he was director of athletics at Cornell University. and gave him its Lifetime Achievement in Philanthropy award in 2013.
Education
Moore was a 1947 cum laude graduate of Mercersburg Academy and a 1952 BME graduate of Cornell University. He was a member of the honorary societies Aleph Samach and Quill and Dagger society at Cornell.
At Mercersburg, he served on the board of regents from 1996 to 2005 and was named the Class of 1932's Distinguished Alumnus in 2002.
Memoir
In March 2017 Moore published a book recounting his various careers as athlete, business person and philanthropist. Running on Purpose: Winning Olympic Gold, Advancing Corporate Leadership and Creating Sustainable Value was co-authored with James Cockerille and published by Edgemoor Ink.
The book is part memoir, providing detail on his upbringing, education and eventual Olympic competition. It is also part business-treatise, detailing numerous turnarounds he led for corporations as well as the athletic department of Cornell. In the last chapter, Moore drew on his athletic orientation and societal impact efforts with Fortune 500 companies. In it he proposed a new form of commercial competitiveness. The challenge he offered is for executives, their boards and investors to embrace a new framework of measurement. Such a framework is not defined, however. Instead Moore proposed a greater integration between the work of pioneering groups in integrated reporting, especially IIRC, and sustainability accounting, like the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB). Underpinning this "call to action" is a belief that long-term factors must be upheld in the management of a business alongside short-term pressures, and that the balance has dangerously skewed toward short-term thinking. By competing through this universal framework and orienting toward "sustainable value creation", Moore suggested, corporations could reverse the erosion of trust that leading companies (if not capitalism in general) are experiencing.
In December 2017, Moore published a second book, One Hurdle at a Time: An Olympian's Guide to Clearing Life's Obstacles, intended for a younger audience, approximately ages 8–14. He collaborated with award-winning children's author Brad Herzog in an attempt to offer a glimpse into his "race of a lifetime".