Yesterday while I was a captive audience during an airplane ride home from Europe, I watched an episode of CBC's The nature of things, where they put Olympic champions on vintage equipment to see how their performance stacked up against the champions of yesteryear when the equipment was state of the art. The focus was on winter sports,but it was interesting to see a champion speed skater trying to match a champion from the early 60s without the modern skates and skin suit.
A bobsled team rode a 1948 sled, and a skier a set of skis from 35 years ago.
The modern day champs did pretty well, and if they had more time to adapt to the equipment, I think their performances would have surpassed their predecessor's by a pretty wide margin.
Can probably put that down to modern training and conditioning.
Anyway, to bring this back to cycling, a good friend of mine embarked on a quest a few years ago to beat the world hour record on the track for his age category. (65 to 69) He was determined to do it on classic "Eddy Merckx" style equipment, including a lugged steel frame, drop bar, and spoke wheels. This was not long after the UCI changed the rules to allow aero equipment like persuit bars and disc wheels to establish records without an asterisk.
He had a frame custom built and I sponsored him with a set of high flange hub wheels with low profile tubular rims. He trained and trained, refusing to give in to the reality that there was no way he could get close to the record without adopting modern equipment.
Anyway, my friend's real accomplishment was putting together an event that saw 4 UCI hour records set during a single day last year at the Milton Ontario velodrome. His own effort fell well short of a world record, even though in the end he relented and went aero ,but I was there to see Giuseppe Marinoni set a world record on a steel frame he built over 40 years ago, but even he conceded to using disc wheels and aero bars to do his record setting ride.
Anyway, as much as I realize you can't stand in the way of progress, I would still like to see some kind of system that recognizes current day efforts as compared to those who went before on the same type of equipment.