EATONTON, Ga. — It's been three years.
Three years of waiting to see the best athletes around the planet compete on the world's largest stage.
However, in the 2024 Olympic Games, one local athlete will compete for the fifth time.
Three-time gold medalist and Central Georgia native Vincent Hancock is a skeet shooter who grew up in Eatonton.
The four-time Olympian competed in 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2021 in Beijing, London, Rio and Tokyo, respectively.
This year, the Olympic roster shows that he also coached a few of his teammates.
Austen Smith and Conner Prince — from Keller, Texas and Burleson, Texas — are on the mixed skeet team and are both coached by Hancock.
Smith is a 2023 ISSF World Championship gold medalist in Mixed Team Skeet, while Prince is a two-time medalist from the 2023 ISSF Rabat World Cup.
The three will also compete alongside Dania Vizzi from Odessa, Florida.
Vizzi is a 2023 Pan American Games gold medalist in Mixed Team Skeet.
When 13WMAZ interviewed Hancock in 2021, he told us he's wanted to achieve this goal his entire life.
"I told my parents that this is what I want to do," Hancock said. "I want to go to the Olympics and win a gold medal."
After he went Beijing, China, in 2008 to compete in his first Olympic Games, Hancock won back-to-back gold medals as a skeet shooter.
At the time, he was the first skeet shooter to ever do that.
When he returned from the London Olympic Games in 2012, he returned to Eatonton for a homecoming.
"To come back to my old school my alma mater, and see people who are just excited for me," Hancock said. "To be able to come out here, look at a gold medal, touch it, feel it, and take pictures with all these kids too, it's a really good sense accomplishment for me to know I can impact people in a positive way."
In addition to his world champion title and Olympic Gold medals, he said he joined the army when he was 17.
"Knowing that you're completely serving selflessly to impact other people. That's what it's all about," Hancock said.
Vincent's late father, Craig Hancock, helped nurture his son's skills after building him a backyard shooting range when Vincent's practice range in Atlanta closed.
"He never missed training, always training," he said in 2021. "Never underestimate your child, what they can do, what they're capable of."