Bling: Montana Olympic Medalist Brady Ellison Back from Paris

He fired his last shot at the Olympics in Paris on Sunday. On Monday he was on his way back home to Montana. And Wednesday morning we were honored to have Silver and Bronze Olympic medalist Brady Ellison drop by our radio studios.

He even brought the medals in so we could hold em for ourselves!

Brady Ellison: "It was pretty awesome over there in Paris to come back with two more medals- bring my medal count to five, which is pretty awesome. Missed the Gold Medal by about five millimeters in a shoot off. So it's a super awesome, super close match. And, yeah, just come home and kind of live it up a little bit, and then start shooting again and getting ready for the next one."

Brady tells me he shoots about 15 to 20 events a year and is still on the international circuit. He grew up in Arizona but now lives in Montana, after he fell in love with the state during a hunting trip several years ago. He and his wife Toja are both competitive archery shooters who met during a competition down in Colombia.

Aaron Flint: "Do you ever get tired of shooting your bow at all?

Brady Ellison: "Oh yeah. I mean, there's lots of days, right, where you get up and you're like- I just don't want to do this today. But- if you want to be the best and you want to be in anything, it's the days that you don't want to do it that you go and do it- is the difference between making it and not making it. You know? It's the discipline of going out there and working every single day and shooting every single day no matter what's happening outside of that that gets you there.

He went to his first Olympics in Beijing back in 2008 at the age of 19.

Brady Ellison:  "France was truly special because we were shooting- our stands were 8000 people. It was insane. Like the noise and the crowd and stuff would get so amped up that like it would make your hair stand up. Like you would just feel the energy. And it was super awesome. And it was also probably the first games that I went to where how the stadium was built, and where we were located within the city it wasn't very windy. And so like when you looked at the scores that we shot and the performances that we had, it was, it was what it was supposed to be at Olympics. There was no guesswork and wind."

Here's the full audio of our chat with Brady Ellison in the 2nd half of the below podcast (you'll also want to listen in on the 1924 Olympics story in the 2nd half of the 8a hour):

Check out several of the great Getty Images from Paris below. Some of the photos also include Ellison and his teammate Casey Kaufhold from the Archery Mixed Team event. Photos from the Olympic Games Paris 2024 at Esplanade Des Invalides in Paris, France.

I also included a few photos that I took after our chat with Ellison on Wednesday morning following our chat on the Montana Talks statewide radio show.