This is entirely dependent on the general level of performance of all the other athletes... So it's largely arbitrary. Everyone else happening to be bad doesn't

This is entirely dependent on the general level of performance of all the other athletes... So it's largely arbitrary. Everyone else happening to be bad doesn't make the top athlete of that generation better than another athlete from another time. I don't think there's anything better than to have them compete in a virtual competition based on absolute numbers, the hard part is correcting for differences in equipment, individual like shoes or collective like a track.