Today's column asks you to make an athletic hop, step and a jump of the imagination and to wonder what would happen if Canberra became a serious Olympic city candidate.

"Rapture!" I hear some of you rejoice. "Horror, we'll all be rooned! We'll be murdered in our beds by drug-crazed Russian shot-putters!" I hear others of you (somehow you seem disproportionately clumped together in our city's NIMBY bastion neighbourhoods) shrill in alarm.

The prospect of our Games' bid would subject our city to some character-building socio-political stresses. We would find out lots about who and what we are. And your columnist has been following timely interviews (with Rio underway) with Andrew Zimbalist, author of Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup. Zimbalist is the authority on what a mixed blessing it is (and seldom a blessing at all) for a city to host the Olympics. You can hear him on an ABC Radio National podcast from the program The Money.

On to Zimbalist in just a few hurls of the discus, but first back to the essay topic I set you in today's first line.

Let's imagine both an Olympic bid by the Canberra of today, but also, first, a bid by a Canberra of the future. A city somewhere will embrace the Summer Olympics of 2036. Why not Canberra?

By 2036 we still won't be a megalopolis but cities don't have to be teemingly huge to host the Olympics. Projections by the authoritative and trustworthy ACT Government have the ACT teeming with 530,000 souls by 2037. We will have more souls than Helsinki had (380,000) for the 1952 Games and more than Atlanta had (460,000) for the Games of 1996.

A more intriguing imaginative exercise is to imagine what would befall if the chance to apply for a Games of the quite near future fell kerplop!, into the lap of today's Canberra that we know. How would it divide us? How might it unite us? If the city's decision went to a referendum of us all, how would we vote?

In 1970 the IOC awarded the 1976 Winter Olympics to Denver. Locals fretted about the cost and after a character-building tussle (character-building for Denver and for Colorado) the No-Olympics-In-Denver movement triumphed at a referendum.

There would be knee-jerk reactions if today's Canberra was offered the Games, and of course Canberra's jerkiest knees belong to those who are horrified by notions that threaten to change Canberra as they have comfortably known it, by anything that requires the splashings out of public money.

There may be few of these sorts of Canberrans, these Grey Nay-Sayers, left as 2036 looms. Today, though, if a Games' prospect landed in the civic lap their Greynesses would try to beat it to death with the abacuses with which Canberra expenditurephobes do their dry, ruthless bean-counting.

But it pains me to say (for my own knee is jerking a passionate Yes to the Canberra Olympics) that these Canberrans would have lots of support in the thoughtful findings of Andrew Zimbalist.

He points to how few Olympics have done anything but harm to the cities that hosted them. He notes how cities' politicians and developers trill "Bonanza!" at the Games' prospect while the people, especially the poorer people, grieve that these shekels spent on a fortnight's orgy in the global limelight are not spent instead on the sorts of things they the citizens need for 52 weeks of the year.

In first world Canberra these sorts of grievances might not have the oomph they have in a Beijing or a Rio (although Canberra's unsightly homeless could expect to be exiled for the glittering fortnight). But some of these grievances would still have some oomph here, in this city where even some dear little light rail and shy pieces of public art are condemned by the shekel-counters as wastes of shekels better spent on better things.

One of Zimbalist's themes is that Olympics-hosting cities suffer financial horrors when they build new sports venues that then after the Games stand about, crumbling. The Los Angeles Games did LA more good than harm (a rare experience for Olympic cities) because LA used already-existing venues. London, too, made canny uses of what it already had, and so for example staged the archery at Lord's the home of cricket.

So here is our challenge, Canberrans! If your knees are jerking "Yes" then think of how we can stage a frugal but still ACT-celebrating Games.

Archery will go on that mighty sweep of lawns (offering one of the great urban vistas of the world) between the new and the Old parliament houses. The table tennis will go in the Great Hall of Parliament House. The weight lifting on Commonwealth Park's Stage 88. The beach volleyball will thrill in the National Arboretum where the stage is erected for Voices In The Forest, the crowd arranged on the slopes of the great grass amphitheatre, and so on.

The Canberra Olympics. Dream of it! Gold, gold to Canberra! Gold!