The Sacramento Bee particularly hates metric and always obscures it in any
story. I gave up on complaining to them, and no longer read their articles.
("Boycott the Bee"??)
Try this version of the story from another paper where it is an 8000 m run.
http://www.thesunnews.com/2011/07/06/2263670/former-olympian-budd-pieterse.html
________________________________
From: Harry Wyeth <[email protected]>
To: U.S. Metric Association <[email protected]>
Sent: Thu, July 7, 2011 11:37:19 PM
Subject: [USMA:50832] Letter to editor re: Zola Budd running article]
This sent to Sacramento Bee.
HARRY WYETH
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Zola Budd running article
Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2011 20:35:14 -0700
From: Harry Wyeth <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Mr. Bennett-Smith;
I enjoyed your article on Zola Budd (Pierterse). I am old enough to have
watched the 1984 Olympic 3000 m run where she and Mary Decker collided.
But...will you and others please recognize that running events (at least those
run on tracks, and lots which are not) are no longer measured in yards and
miles. This runner competed in an 8 km race, period. I cannot understand why
sports writers keep injecting obsolete mile measurements, as you did in
referring to the race as 4.97 miles. Any reader interested enough in the
subject to read your article would know how far 8 kilometers is.
I doubt that the Bee reports 1500 m races as being so-and-so yards, or some
decimal part of a mile. Why should a road race be treated differently?
Dual measurements help no one and just confuse things. I hope you will report
metric events accurately in the future.
Thanks again for the nice article.
HARRY WYETH
Grass Valley
