LOGAN TOWNSHIP, NJ – The Johns Hopkins men's cross country team was on the road to compete in the Rowan Border Battle Saturday morning in its final race before Conference Championships, with Emmanuel Leblond's second win of the year pacing a quartet of top 15 finishers for the Blue Jays en route to a third-place team result.
 
Leblond sat in sixth after the first mile in Saturday's 8K, but quickly worked his way up the field, climbing to first by the three-mile marker and never looking back in another strong showing. The junior was the only athlete to run a sub-24-minute 8K in a field of over 275 competitors, crossing the line in 23:52.9 to finish more than 13 seconds ahead of the runner up.
 
Next to cross the line was Andrew Myers in an incredibly impressive outing for the Maryland native. Myers used a sub-10 two-mile split to soar from 34^th to 12^th where he stayed for the remainder of the race en route to his highest finish since the season-opener. Coming in just behind the senior were Connor Oiler (13^th / 24:55.6) and Brady Ott (15^th / 24:59.8), with Rowan Cassidy's 17^th place finish with a time of 25:05.2 rounding out the Blue Jays' point scorers.
 
16^th-ranked Lynchburg won the meet with 49 points, with Washington and Lee and Hopkins both tying with 56 points, but it was the Generals winning the tiebreak to take second with the Blue Jays settling into third. Other Centennial Conference competitors included Haverford and Swarthmore, which finished fifth (152 points) and sixth (198) in the meet respectively.
 
Hopkins also had runners compete in the Open race in which Eli Merritt paced the Blue Jays with a fifth-place finish after crossing the line in 26:05.7. Arjun Subramanian also earned a top 10 finish with a time of 26:16.8, with Aakash Iyer (16^th / 26:38.1), Dhruv Mahajan (17^th / 26:40.2), Joey Souverein (18^th / 26:41.2) and Nicholas Pham (20^th / 26:43.0) completing Hopkins' finishers in the top 20.
 
The Blue Jays are back in action Saturday, Nov. 2 where they will look to win the program's third consecutive Centennial Conference Championship.