SEQUIM – The Olympic hero from Sequim gets his own special day.

Sequim Museum & Arts, 544 N. Sequim Ave., will host “Honor Matt Dryke Day” on Friday, Sept. 13, from noon to 3 p.m. at the museum to honor Dryke, the 1984 Olympic gold medalist in skeet shooting.

Dryke, a Sequim native who turned 66 on Wednesday, won Olympic gold in skeet shooting at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics with a record 198 points.

He was a two-time World skeet shooting champion (1983 and 1986) and a nine-time U.S. champion. He competed in the Olympic Games three times (1984, 1988, 1992) and would have become a four-time Olympian after qualifying for the 1980 Moscow Games, but did not participate due to the U.S. team boycott.

The event comes one day before Dryke joins nine other individuals, including 1936 Olympic gold medalist Joe Rantz, and a team in the first induction ceremony into the Sequim Athletic Hall of Fame.

“I’ve known him and his parents since he was born,” said Judy Reandeau Stipe, volunteer executive director of Sequim Museum & Arts. “He’s just a treasure; I love him to bits.”

She said she helped organize a special day just to remind the community of Dryke’s achievements.

Dryke will be present at the museum to talk to visitors and tell about his competitions, Stipe said.

“He likes to talk and shake people’s hands,” she said.

Even though classes are resuming, Stipe hopes she can persuade a group of students from Sequim High School, which is directly across the street from the museum, to visit. Dryke met with a number of Sequim teens in December 2023 at a party following a screening of the film “The Boys in the Boat,” which centers on Rantz’s gold medal win; those teens had supported efforts to bring a premiere of the film to the Olympic Peninsula.

“(Matt) loves to talk to young people; he’s very easy to talk to,” Stipe said. “It’s wonderful to see such a small town produce two gold medalists.”

Born in Port Angeles in 1958, Dryke trained at his family’s 100-acre Sunnydell Shooting Grounds in Agnew – his father, Chuck, converted the land into a training facility for his son – and rose to fame in the shooting world as an accomplished sharpshooter.

Army service

Dryke joined the Army Marksmanship Unit at age 18 and shot with it from 1978 to 1987. At the Pan American Games, he won gold medals in 1983 and 1987 and a silver medal in 1979. He won gold medals at the Americas Championships in 1981 and 1985.

Eventually he took over the management of the shooting range from his father and gave private lessons there.

Dryke met his wife Yvonne, a pistol shooter from Peru, in 1995 while taking shooting lessons abroad. They married in 2002 and have a daughter, Ellen. The family continues to live in Sequim, where Dryke has resumed shooting lessons in Sunnydell despite some health issues in recent years.

The Sequim Museum & Arts has a permanent exhibit about Dryke and a video telling his story.

“We get a lot of tour groups from cruise ships, and they (say they) haven’t heard much about this young man,” Stipe said.

They were amazed, she said, especially when they watched video of his “antics,” as she calls them: making coleslaw (shooting cabbage and onions into the air), shooting holes in dimes with his guns and hitting targets while riding a unicycle.

“This is a whole new dimension of Matt Dryke that people haven’t seen yet,” she said.

Stipe said she hopes the community will declare the second Friday in September as Honor Matt Dryke Day.

Matt Dryke of the Sequim Museum & Arts, a gold medalist in skeet shooting at the 1984 Olympics, teaches Sequim teenager Danika Chen at the Sunnydell Shooting Grounds in June.