Yeah I tried that and came out empty.
I had to expose the oldid in order to be able to use it so ended up modifying the core
It's not ideal but I couldn't find any other way around that (I don't know why you wouldn't expose the old id if it's there in the table anyways).
I modified node.php to include the oldid in the return array for the channel nodes
Now I can use it from the templates.