A Hit-or-Miss Proposition : Skeet Star Matt Dryke Says Skulduggery, Not Shooting, Cost Him an International Title

Matt Dryke, one of the world’s best international skeet shooters, likes to extol the virtues of his sport.

“I’ve always told people it’s a lot better than other sports where you have judges because you can tell whether you hit or miss.”

Dryke, who has hit many more clay birds than he has missed in more than a decade of competition, may change that philosophy after losing his first major international title in two years.

Dryke refused to accept a silver medal at the World Moving Target shoot last November at Valencia, Venezuela, after claiming that he had lost the gold not with his shooting but through a bit of skulduggery.

Dryke, who has won gold medals in the 1984 Olympics, the 1986 World Championships and last summer’s Pan-American Games, said Italian-speaking referees from Venezuela manipulated the event so that Italy’s Andrea Benelli tied him after the 200-round competition was completed. Benelli won the gold medal in a shoot-off against Dryke.

Dryke claims he should have won the gold and Cuba’s Alfredo Torres should have won the silver after the regulation 200 rounds were fired. Torres finished third.

Cuban officials in Havana were unavailable for comment.

Dryke was ahead until his 199th target, when the judges called a miss on a shot the American claims he hit. Lloyd Woodhouse, U.S. shotgun coach, said Dryke shot a little later than usual, but hit the target: “At least three or four good-size pieces came off,” he said.

Said Dryke: “I shot it and broke it and the referee called a loss. I looked at him and said, ‘ Bueno ?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, bueno .’ So, I turned around and shot my second target and broke it and then came to find out they had called it a loss.”

The miss put Dryke in a tie with Benelli, who had been given some hits on shots U.S. officials claim he missed. Dryke said he first questioned the judging when Benelli was credited for a hit on his 199th target.

“He missed one before it and they called it,” Dryke said. “Then he missed again. . . . The main ref raised his horn. I saw him look over to the side referee who gave him some baseball signals. He rubbed his hair, rubbed his chin. So, the main ref put down the horn.”

Referees blow a shrill sounding horn to officially record a miss in international skeet, a sport in which competitors use 12-gauge shotguns to hit clay targets thrown into the air by mechanical traps.

Before Benelli and Dryke met to shoot for the gold medal, a junior division shoot-off was held with Italy’s Ennio Falco in a second-place tie against an English competitor. Dryke said the Italian had four misses in a round of 25 before the judges called a loss.

“The crowd was booing,” he said. “They were wondering when the judges were going to call a loss.”

Because of the improprieties, Dryke said he refused to attend the award ceremony, though his coach asked him to go.

“I told him, ‘No, I won’t go up there and accept that medal because that’s just telling them, ‘Yeah, it’s all right,’ ” Dryke said.

Video tapes of the final round by Danish and Colombian shooters also showed Dryke hitting the target, Woodhouse said. The tapes were shown at the shooting club where the event was held after the awards ceremony.

“I’ve traveled all around the world for 2 1/2 years as the national coach and I haven’t seen anything like this,” Woodhouse said.

Dryke said after the competition that Benelli looked at him and shrugged, but the Italian said this week in a telephone interview from Florence, Italy, that he had won the medal fairly.

“I thought it was a just competition,” he said. “There was no prejudice on part of the judges.”

He said Dryke’s 199th shot was a “spoiled target,” a clay bird that comes out of the mechanical trap already broken.

Dryke says he does not fault Benelli, who, he said, could get in trouble with his federation for protesting the competition.

“All the shooters from the USSR, East Germany, Cuba, Denmark, Argentina, everywhere, came up to me after it was over to congratulate me,” Dryke said. “They know who won.”

Nothing can be done, however, to change the results, said Ray Carter, U.S. shooting team administrator from his National Rifle Assn. office in Washington.

Woodhouse said international rules are implicit in that the referee’s decision in the field is final. He said he argued to no avail when Dryke was called for the miss on the 199th target. He also said no one had protested when Benelli allegedly was credited for hits on missed targets.

“We all feel that Matt was robbed out of the gold medal, but I know of nothing that can be done,” Woodhouse said.

U.S. officials have prepared a formal letter of protest to the International Shooting Union (ISU). Woodhouse says the best he can hope for is a rule change that will ensure against such incidents at future shoots.

For Dryke, that is little compensation. But last week, he said he received some redemption of sorts when a gold medal arrived in the mail from the Venezuela shooting federation.

“It’s unofficial, but it’s the same medal that Benelli has,” Dryke said.

Venezuelan shooting officials in Caracas were unavailable for comment.

Carter said the ISU considered canceling last November’s event because of fears the site was not adequate. Target sites for international events are meticulously scrutinized by ISU officials. Factors such as background, weather, seating are taken into account when approving a facility.

But an ISU technical representative was not given enough time to check the Valencia site, Carter said.

“He got there and was basically told, ‘Take it or leave it,’ ” Carter said. “It was not perfect.”

But ISU officials balked at canceling because some countries already had sent their teams to South America.

Carter said the World Moving Target shoot was not the first time shooters have had bad experiences in Venezuela.

“They made a real mess of the 1982 World Championships,” he said. “The worlds are a bigger competition than the Olympics.

“Venezuela won’t get another competition for a long time. But they wouldn’t anyway.”

Times staff writers Louis Fleming, David Reyes and Henry Rivero contributed to this story.