LU's Chelanga wins NCAA title

Smashing the LaVern Gibson 10K course record by 22 seconds, Liberty’s Sam Chelanga was crowned the NCAA Division I Men’s Cross Country champion Monday afternoon in Terre Haute, Ind.

He crossed the finish line in 28:41.3, 25 seconds ahead of second-place finisher David McNeill, of Northern Arizona. Stanford’s Chris Derrick, who defeated Chelanga at the Pre-Nationals and was favored to take the national title, finished third.

“I’m so happy,” Chelanga said after the race. “I finally got it. I did my training well. I did a lot of hard work and … Stepping on the line today, I knew I needed to prove something, that I can do this, and I won it.”

Chelanga, now a six-time All-American, becomes the third NCAA Division I national champion from Liberty. Flames graduate assistant coach Josh McDougal was the 2007 NCAA National Cross Country Champion, and current assistant coach Heather (Sagan) Zealand took the title in the mile at the 2002 NCAA Division I Indoor Track & Field Championships.

Also running for Liberty was redshirt junior Evans Kigen, who finished 20th with a time of 30:01.0, marking the first time in school history that Liberty has had two All-Americans in the same year.

After running an 8:40 3K split, Chelanga rushed to an early lead, breaking away from the pack to create a 28-second gap at the 5K mark with a time of 14:09. He was not contested for the remainder of the race.

“I had in my mind of going two miles with (the leaders) steady and then break away,” he said. “But apparently, those guys were all with me for the first mile and I just said, ‘You know what, I’m just going to start going.’”

He set new Liberty and Big South records at the 8K split with a time of 22:46.6. The previous 8K record was 22:51, a time he set at the 2008 Pre-Nationals.

No one has run the NCAA Division I Cross Country Championship faster than Chelanga since 1979, when Washington State’s Henry Rono finished the race in 28:19.6.

Chelanga, who was recently named this year’s USTFCCCA Southeast Regional Cross Country Athlete of the Year, finished second behind Oregon’s Galen Rupp in the 2008 national meet. The redshirt junior from Nairobi, Kenya, won every race he entered this season with the exception of the NCAA Pre-Nationals on Oct. 17. In that 8K event, he led most of the way before being outrun by Derrick on the final straightaway. Chelanga finished second with a time of 23:34.6 that day, seven seconds behind Derrick.

“We tried to make him be patient in this race,” McDougal said. “The plan was to make him wait until about 3K, but I knew he was going to go right away. I said before the race, it was going to be at least a 30-second victory because I’ve trained with him and he ran 27:27 last year … with (limited) training. This was just a good day. I could tell from the first mile that he had it.”

This marks the second consecutive year that the Flames sent two runners to the national meet.

Oklahoma State claimed the men’s team title with 127 points, followed by Oregon with 143 points.