No one has Olympic stories like former UAF shooting star Matt Emmons

The Olympic motto is faster, higher, stronger. The Matt Emmons motto is resilience, perseverance and optimism.

Emmons is the greatest shooter to come out of UAF's storied riflery program, and after college he became one of the greatest shooters in U.S. history.

He also has a couple of the all-time great Olympic stories — stories about finding romance, surviving cancer and remaining upbeat despite monumental blunders.

Emmons, 35, heads into Brazil as a four-time Olympian with three-time Olympic medals, but he is perhaps best known for the medals he didn't win.

At the 2004 Athens Olympics, Emmons won gold in the prone rifle competition and was poised to win more gold in the three-position event when he crossfired on his final shot. He hit the wrong target and dropped from first place to eighth place.

At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Emmons won silver in prone and was again leading the three-position competition as he prepared to take his final shot. This time, his finger twitched and his misfired. He dropped from first place to fourth.

The stories don't end there. In 2010, he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer but battled through it to return to the Olympics for a third time. He left the 2012 London Games with a bronze medal in prone.

These days Emmons lives in the Czech Repubic with his wife, Katerina, and their three kids. Katerina is also a three-time Olympic medalist in riflery and the chief figure in Emmons' best Olympic story. Emmons met her in Athens after the cross-firing incident when Katerina and her father introduced themselves to express their condolences for his setback and their admiration for the way he handled it.

Emmons has maintained a good attitude through all of his Olympic adventures and misadventures. When history repeated itself in Beijing and a reporter asked about his mental toughness, Emmons smiled, according to an account in The Guardian.

"Dude, I've got two Olympic medals," he said. "There's nothing wrong with my mentality."

Though Emmons has shown that anything can happen at the Olympics, many like his chances to pick up a fourth medal in Brazil. Earlier this year in Munich, he set a World Cup three-position finals record by shooting a score of 464.1, and he enters the Games as the world's top-ranked three-position shooter.