Former Madison High School running star Matthew McClintock made history Sunday, as he broke the all-time Big Ten Championships 8,000-meter record en route to becoming Purdue’s first Big Ten champion in 72 years.
The senior from Athens, Maine, helped the men’s side finish seventh, with a time of 23 minutes, 12.1 seconds in a meet held at the Sydney R. Marovitz Golf Course in Chicago.
“It was me and Mason Ferlic from Michigan, and I was able to use the last 400 meters to my advantage,” McClintock said in a Purdue news release.
“I think a lot of it comes down to [assistant cross-country] coach [Jeff] Kent’s training. He’s helped me build my mileage and my intensity. Each year builds on the next, so you keep progressing up. I didn’t see my finish time, but I caught a glimpse of a clock and thought, ‘Wow, I ran really fast.’ I didn’t know it was a record until we looked it up. That wasn’t first in my mind, but that’s something that’s really cool to have.”
McClintock pulled the lead group early, making the men’s race more of a sprint, a tactic he credits to his outdoor track and field Big Ten 10,000-meter championship, where he used a similar technique. The race came down to the final 400 meters, where McClintock and Ferlic, also an All-American, were pretty even.
That’s where McClintock’s speed work kicked in, and he was able to run away from the field and win by 7.5 seconds. His time broke the all-time conference championship record of 23:18, set in 2011 by Wisconsin’s Mohammed Ahmed.
“I’ve always known how to race well, which is something that has helped me beat guys that are more talented than me,” McClintock said. “Getting the monkey off my back by winning the 10K in track was big. Today’s race was the fastest race in Big Ten history. The outdoor track season showed me how to win because I learned I had to make the race as hard for everyone else as possible and that was to get out to a fast 5K.”
“Matt [McClintock] has been knocking on the door since he was a freshman,” head coach Lonnie Greene said. “He has been right there his entire career. For it to come to fruition really blessed me because he did it in grand style. He ran away from the field, and I was really happy for him and coach Kent. Coach Kent saw that he could win it and saw that he was extremely sharp. It blesses me that a Boilermaker could be the one to break the tape.”