Roman Andres Burruchaga authored the biggest win of his young career on Tuesday, and in doing so he closed a chapter of tennis history. The 24-year-old Argentine beat Stan Wawrinka 6-4, 4-6, 6-3 in the first round of the Millennium Estoril Open — the last clay-court match the three-time Grand Slam champion will ever play at tour level.
Wawrinka, competing in the farewell season he announced in December, pushed the world No. 60 to the edge before falling in two hours and 28 minutes. The 41-year-old Swiss saved three match points — one of them rescued by the down-the-line one-handed backhand that has defined his game for two decades — before Burruchaga held his nerve on a fourth to advance.
The match followed the pattern of a veteran refusing to leave quietly. Burruchaga managed the early breaks to take the opening set, Wawrinka answered with his heavy forehand to level, and the Argentine broke to open the third and never let the lead go. When Wawrinka finally netted, the result was sealed: a generational bookend in their first-ever meeting, a champion of the 2010s handing off to a player who was a small child when the Swiss turned pro in 2002.
For Wawrinka, clay was never incidental. It was the surface on which he reached his sport’s summit. At the 2015 French Open he beat Novak Djokovic in the final to capture Roland Garros — the middle jewel of a career that also produced the 2014 Australian Open and the 2016 US Open, and that placed him among the very few men to defeat each of the Big Four at a major. “Clay was always special for me,” he said afterward, reflecting on a childhood spent practicing and watching tournaments on the dirt. He leaves the surface with a tour-level record of 202 wins against 124 losses.
The Estoril organizers marked the occasion. After the match, Tournament Director Joao Zilhao presented Wawrinka with a commemorative imprint recognizing his final appearance on the club’s clay and the end of his clay-court career. It was a quiet send-off — fitting for a farewell that has unfolded tournament by tournament across 2026, from Dubai earlier this season and now Estoril, rather than in one staged ceremony.
For Burruchaga, the win carried a different weight. The son of Jorge Burruchaga — the forward who scored the goal that won Argentina the 1986 World Cup final — has been assembling the best stretch of his career on European clay. He arrived in Portugal fresh off a semifinal run in Umag last week, only the second ATP semifinal of his career, and the victory over Wawrinka lifted him into the second round against Portuguese No. 1 Nuno Borges. Currently the fourth-ranked Argentine, Burruchaga reached a career high of No. 56 in May and represents a small but rising Argentine presence on the men’s tour — heirs to a country that has long prized the red dirt.
Borges, the fifth seed, reached the second round earlier Tuesday with a straight-sets win over Brazilian qualifier Orlando Luz and is chasing a deep run on home soil. For Wawrinka, the road now leads away from clay for good. His farewell season is expected to wind down through the hard-court swing before a planned final ATP appearance at the Swiss Indoors in Basel, with an exhibition send-off — billed as “One Last Backhand” alongside Roger Federer, Andy Murray and Gael Monfils — scheduled for December in Geneva.
The scoreline tells one story: a 41-year-old ranked outside the top 100, beaten in an opening round by a man 17 years his junior. The occasion told another. When Wawrinka walked off the Estoril clay on Tuesday, it was the last time one of the most admired one-handed backhands of his generation would strike a ball on the surface where his greatest triumph was won.
