Mis-fire costs Emmons gold

Qiu Jian of China won gold and Emmons finished fourth after his finger squeezed the trigger just before he was ready to fire wiping out his huge 3.3-point lead.

He appeared stunned when his final shot registered a mere 4.4 after he had scored above a 10 on seven of his previous nine shots.

"The way I come into a target is I start above the target and come down from 12 o'clock and get into the bullseye," he said. "And as I get down into the bullseye is when I start to get on the trigger [with my finger] and as I was starting to get on the trigger, the gun just went off.

"I guess I just set it off. I got on the trigger a little too hard. I didn't feel my trigger shaking but I guess it was. It just hit the trigger, the gun went off and I was like 'uh, that's not going to be good - I hope it hit the black'.

It hit the black, but a little high, he said.

"If the shot had made it all the way down to the bullseye, it'd have been pretty decent."

Emmons also threw away a near-certain gold medal in the event four years ago at Athens on the final shot when he fired at the wrong target.

Ukraine's Jury Sukhorukov won the silver on Sunday and Slovenia's Rajmond Debevec the bronze.