I'm mostly enjoying the Tour of Britain 2009 coverage - there's a bunch of guys on there who will be big names in cycling in the coming years I'm sure.

However - could the commentary team PLEASE be asked to make their minds up over how to describe distances! Just choose imperial OR metric, not both at once - please?  I know we live in the final country in Europe still using archaic units on our signposts, but cycling is an international sporting event. Those of us watching it are probably much the same people who watched the Tour de France back in the summer, and we didn't need it "helpfully" translated into miles and miles per hour for us then, and we don't now with the Tour of Britain!

A crowning glory was a couple of days back where we were told that the peleton had been doing 25 miles per hour over the last 40km! (Or very similar - you get the idea!). Other superbly incomprehensible facts have included "That's 56 miles covered, and 93km to go - see you after the break". <sigh>

Likewise, we get told that some 1st category climb is "2.3 miles" long. You just can't draw conclusions with stages in the other great road-races when you're saddled with facts like that! Mont Ventoux for instance is a 21km climb. How do we (or our 8yr old children sitting next to us) compare that with a "2.3 mile" climb. Is it a tenth? A fifth? No idea without a pocket calculator.

Please guys - enough with the helpful imperial conversions!! Everyone in this country under the age of 50 did everything in metric in school. You can assume we're familiar with it!

I'm sure we're not going to be told in the 2012 Olympics how fast Usain Bolt just ran the "109 yards, 1ft and 31/32nds inches" are we?

Are we? 

Please say no....

Steve