Ignacio Buse, who is the Italian bogeyman who took Hamburg (and will be at Roland Garros)

Beating Tommy Paul on Saturday afternoon in the final act of the tournament, Ignacio Buse won the ATP 500 in Hamburg, ending in the best way a real fairy tale: the Peruvian, currently number 57 on the circuit (he will rise to 31st position at the next update), had in fact started from the qualifiers and certainly did not start among the favorites once he reached the main draw.

Instead, the Lima-born tennis player on March 25, 2004, who had beaten Niels McDonald and Hugo Gaston in the qualifiers, beat Flavio Cobolli, Jakub Mensik, Ugo Humbert, Aleksandar Kovacevic and Tommy Paul in the main draw, the latter by scores of 7-6(6), 4-6, 6-3 after a marathon of exactly three hours, thus winning his first major circuit tournament after winning three at the ITF World Tennis Tour level and two at the ATP Challenger level.

One of the curious features of this young man is his record against Italian tennis players: out of 22 matches played against athletes from the Bel Paese, in fact, he has won as many as 18, losing just four. The one against Cobolli in Hamburg, by the way, was the eighth consecutive victory against an Italian tennis player, after those in 2025 with Luciano Darderi in Aix and Luca Castagnola in Vicenza, the double success with Francesco Passaro (Heilbronn 2025 and Buenos Aires 2026), and the victories in 2026 with Matteo Berrettini (two, in Rio and Marrakech) and Lorenzo Sonego in Rome.

Passaro himself was the last Italian to beat him, on September 2, 2024 at the Genoa Challenger. For the other tricolor successes one has to go back to June 24 (Enrico Dalla Valle beat him at the Milan Challenger) and May 20 of the same year (Lorenzo Giustino defeated him in the ITF M25 tournament in Mataro), while in 2023 came a knockout against Lorenzo Claverie at the Bogota Challenger.

Ignacio Buse will, predictably, also be at Roland Garros and will arrive in Paris with the inertia decidedly in his favor. In the first round, however, his opponent will be the number 11 seed Andrey Rublev, while at least up to he is not expected to meet Italians: given the numbers against our tennis players, this is something that certainly plays against this nice guy from Lima.