20 animal-human matchups we’d like to see besides Michael Phelps vs. a shark

LONDON, ENGLAND – JULY 16: Roger Federer of Switzerland celebrates victory with the trophy after the Gentlemen’s Singles final of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club at Wimbledon on July 16, 2017 in London, England. (Photo by Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)

11. Roger Federer vs. a golden retriever

This matchup between Roger Federer and a golden retriever may just be the cutest on this entire list, but there definitely wouldn’t be much of a competition involved with this one.

Federer is the most dominant tennis player out there, and is riding high after winning his eighth Wimbledon this past week. He has, outside of maybe Serena Williams, the most influence out of any tennis player out there, and it’s time he puts that outreach to good use when he steps out onto the tennis court next.

Golden retrievers notoriously love tennis balls, and something has to be wrong with you if you’re not a fan of binge watching videos of dogs chasing tennis balls on YouTube every now and then. It’s time to raise the stakes, and create of the most viral videos in Internet history with two of the world’s biggest loves.

For this competition, there’s two ways this could go. First, we could train a golden retriever to hold a tennis racket, and just have Federer serve the ball and see what the dog could do with the racket in its mouth.

On the other hand, we could just skip the competition between the two, and have them compete together to see how many serves the retriever could fetch for Federer in a set amount of time. To add some fuel to the fire, we could get Williams in there with her own retriever, and have two teams of humans with dogs to see which duo would perform better.

It’s kind of breaking the whole rules to do the latter here, but it may be a bit more competitive than giving a dog a tennis racket and hoping for the best.