How Rafael Nadal tied a historic tennis record, then lost it hours later

For years, Rafael Nadal has been chasing Guillermo Vilas’s record of 45 clay-court titles.

A years back Vilas's number was rightly put to 46 by both the ATP and ITF but how did his count reached to 49 while him being in his 60s.

Just before Nadal was to play the Buenos Aires final against Monaco, the ATP and ITF gave the 62-year-old Vilas three more clay-court titles, 32 years after he last held a trophy. The change was actually made before Sunday’s final, but many media outlets didn’t get the memo, such as the BBC, which wrote:

Spain’s Rafael Nadal won a record-equalling 46th career clay-court title with a 6-4 6-1 victory over home favourite Juan Monaco in the Argentina Open in Buenos Aires.

To some, Nadal had tied a historic record and then had it taken away.

How did Guillermo Vilas earn three more titles on the day Rafael Nadal was about to tie him? It’s because folks in Argentina, including Vilas himself, fairly noted that the original number had been wrong all along. Vilas’s two titles in Toronto (1974 and 1976) and one in Virginia Beach (1977) had actually come on clay, not on hard court, as was originally believed by the ATP and ITF. So while Vilas’s overall tournament wins didn’t change, his clay and hard court victories did.