Ignacio Buse spent most of 2025 on the ATP Challenger Tour, representing a country that had produced five Top 100 men in the history of the rankings. By the end of August 2026 he had two ATP Tour titles, won Hamburg as a qualifier, become the youngest champion in Winston-Salem history and reached a career-high ranking of No. 30. He is the first Peruvian man to win a tour-level title since Luis Horna in 2007.
A Family Name on a Stadium
The stadium court at Club Lawn Tennis de la Exposición in Lima is named Estadio Hermanos Buse, after Ignacio’s grandfather Eduardo and Eduardo’s twin brother Enrique, who both played the game, according to the ATP. Eduardo competed at the US National Championships at the West Side Tennis Club in New York as early as 1942. Ignacio never met him.
Buse began playing at Country Club de Villa in Lima with his father, Hans, a tennis coach who moved to Miami in 2019 to work at Royal Palm Tennis Club. “Before we started practice, we played mini tennis and that was such a battle for me,” Buse told ATPTour.com in 2025. His uncle is the chef Gastón Acurio. By 2025 he was based in Barcelona.
He climbed inside the junior Top 10 and planned to play college tennis in the United States, but could not secure a visa to enroll. “When I couldn’t go to college — basically there was a problem with the residence — there I said, ‘Okay, I will go professional’, when I was 18,” he said.
The Challenger Years
Buse made his ATP Challenger debut in 2022 ranked outside the Top 1,400. In his second Challenger event, at home in Lima and ranked No. 886, he took top seed Federico Coria, a former Top 50 player, to a deciding set. “I was starting to believe in myself that I could do it,” he said.
He won two Challenger titles in 2025, including Heilbronn in June. In September of that year he clinched Peru’s Davis Cup tie against Portugal in Lima by beating Nuno Borges, on the court that carries his family’s name. He made his Grand Slam main-draw debut at the 2025 US Open, losing in the first round to sixth seed Ben Shelton.
Hamburg: A Qualifier’s Title
Buse entered the Hamburg Open in May through qualifying. He beat defending champion Flavio Cobolli in the first round and Jakub Mensik in the second, and in the final he beat sixth seed Tommy Paul 7-6(6), 4-6, 6-3 in a little over three hours on the Am Rothenbaum clay.
It nearly went the other way. Buse was treated for dizziness by the tournament doctor after five games and trailed 0-4 in the second set, according to the ATP. The match turned in the second game of the third set, when he missed four break points and took the fifth to go 2-0 up. He converted five of the 12 break points he earned. “I struggled to sleep [last night],” he said afterwards. “It’s the best feeling in my entire life for sure.”
Buse became the first Peruvian ATP Tour champion since Horna won Viña del Mar in 2007, joining Pablo Arraya, Jaime Yzaga and Horna as the country’s only men’s tour-level singles champions. He was the first qualifier to win a tour title since Valentin Vacherot in Shanghai in 2025 and the third to win an ATP 500, after Nikoloz Basilashvili in Hamburg and Daniil Medvedev in Tokyo, both in 2018. The title lifted him 26 places to No. 31 and into the Top 50 for the first time.
At Roland Garros, 11th seed Andrey Rublev beat him 6-3, 6-7(8), 6-3, 7-5 in the first round, according to the tournament.
Wimbledon and Winston-Salem
Buse won his first match at Wimbledon in June, the tournament confirmed. In August he won the Winston-Salem Open, beating Adam Walton, 16th seed Daniel Altmaier, eighth seed Juan Manuel Cerundolo and Benjamin Bonzi before beating fourth seed Arthur Fery 6-3, 6-2 in the final, according to ESPN results.
The ATP’s account of the final has Buse dictating play with his forehand, taking the first set in 30 minutes and breaking Fery three times in the second to finish in 77 minutes. At 22 he became the youngest champion in the tournament’s history, about a month younger than Hubert Hurkacz was when he won it in 2019. He is the second Peruvian man to win a tour-level title on hard courts, after Yzaga, and the title took him to a career-high No. 30. A year earlier he had been No. 135.
At the US Open he beat Marcos Giron 3-6, 6-3, 6-3, 6-7(6), 6-1 for his first win at Flushing Meadows, then lost to Bonzi 6-2, 7-6(4), 6-0 in the second round, according to ESPN.
Grand Slam Best Results
- Australian Open — [UNVERIFIED: no main-draw appearance found in approved sources; confirm on the ATP player activity page]
- Roland Garros — First round (2026)
- Wimbledon — Second round (2026) [UNVERIFIED: Wimbledon confirms the first-round win only; the second-round exit is not confirmed in an approved source]
- US Open — Second round (2026)
Season Snapshot (5 October 2026)
- Career-high ranking: No. 30 (31 August 2026)
- 2026 titles: Hamburg (ATP 500, clay), Winston-Salem (ATP 250, hard)
- This week: Rolex Shanghai Masters, where he is seeded to meet second seed Carlos Alcaraz in the third round, according to the ATP draw
- Listed among the players for the Erste Bank Open in Vienna (24 October to 1 November) on the tournament website
This snapshot is dated and will change. The career record above does not.
