The American who missed the target but found love

Aug 7, 2008 06:49 EDT

Matt Emmons lost a gold medal with an ill-timed lapse in concentration on his very last shot at the 2004 Olympics yet won a bigger prize a few moments later when his future wife started chatting him up.

The American was one shot from a gold medal in the 50-metre rifle three-position target event when he fired at the wrong target. As he was consoling himself with a beer, Czech shooter Katerina Kurkova, doubling as a TV analyst, offered her commiserations and one thing led to another.

I had been speaking to him, briefly, just before Kurkova’s arrival and when I interviewed him again today, four years on, we both joked that if I’d been more talkative things might have turned out differently.

“It was a very good thing that interview didn’t last too long,” he said.

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