Meters (metres?) vs. Yards

I'm still planning to research information on Ryan's current training partner, Leith Brodie. However first I wanted to express some frustration with the fact that for short course races U.S. swimmers tend to compete in yards while the rest of the world competes in meters.

I'm as guilty as the next American of clinging to our old fashion units of measurement. If someone told me they were 195 cm tall and weighed 95 kgs, I could only guess as to what that really meant. Nevertheless, our antiquated use of yards in swimming is making it difficult for me to understand the times the swimmers are putting up at the European short course championships and to compare them to the times of the U.S. swimmers.

A few years ago I lived in London for 6 months and it became obvious that Americans do some very fundamental things differently than the rest of the world. For instance, in most of the world the 24-hour clock is used for time, the date is stated before the month i.e. today is 16/12 rather than 12/16, and the metric system is used for measurement. We are very isolated and stubborn to resist changing these things.

There are probably lots of pools in the U.S. that are 25 yards long. The YMCA pool I swam in as a kid was a yards pool. I realize if a pool is 25 yards long it may be cost prohibitive and perhaps impossible to lengthen it to 25 meters. However, the pool in Atlanta where the U.S. short course nationals were just held appeared to be a 50 meter pool that was shortened to 25 yards with a bulkhead. My vote is for the U.S. to get with the rest of the world on this issue. After all, we may prefer how our height and weight sounds under the metric system (definitely weight because 1 kg = 2.2 lbs)!

ETA: I just did the conversion on 195 cm tall and 95kg - it's almost 6 ft 5 in tall and 209 lbs, a football player sized person! It proves to me that I have a lot to learn about the metric system.