Jamaica’s Usain Bolt posing on the podium after the Jamaican team won the gold and set a new world record in the men’s 4x100m relay final at the World Athletics Championships in Daegu, South Korea. (AP)

What’s your Olympic fantasy? Grazing the stratosphere with a javelin? Smoking Michael Phelps in the 400-meter Individual Medley? Plunging from the 10 meter platform with barely a splash? Our weekly news panel dug into it this week. Here are the responses from our panelists.

“I am nobody’s idea of an athlete,” said Atlantic political reporter Molly Ball, “But my father (Richard Ball) is a former Olympic athlete. He was on the U.S. cycling team in the 1972 Olympics, in the team time trials. So, I think, as a tribute to my father, I have to say cycling.”

“He was an amateur cyclist and math grad student at Wisconsin-Madison at the time; he’s now a retired math professor,” she said in a follow-up email after the show. “The team time trial team he was on came in 15th, which was the best the U.S. had ever placed, cycling not being a traditional American strength. I was the only kid I knew who watched the Tour de France growing up.”

Our own Jack Beatty? Olympic weightlifting, was his surprise answer. Why? He said it “Stands for the entrepreneurial, adventuresome spirit of our people.” Indeed.

Bill McKenzie, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist from the Dallas Morning News, said that the 26.2 mile endurance challenge would be his dream event. “Those marathoners coming through the tunnel. I’d be last, but I’d love to come through that tunnel and hear the roar.”

Guest host Wade Goodwyn had his own Olympic dream: “I just smoked Usain Bolt in the 100 meters, much to his shock,” said Goodwyn.  “We’re up on the podium and I pull the Usain Bolt lighting bolt pose. And he gets furious and punches me clean off the podium and an unseemly melee in the infield ensues that tarnishes an otherwise wonderful Olympics.”

Post a comment with your Olympic dream!