I was not aware of the limit on athlete numbers.
I would presume that any contender for the IP,
which I always thought was the pinnacle of track cycling,
would be at the Olympics, anyway, for one of the other events,
the Team Pursuit at the very least.
It's already heavily weighted towards dumb ways of going up and down a pool
https://www.velonews.com/news/removing-individual-pursuit-from-the-olympics-is-a-mistake-john-wilcockson-tells-uci-president-pat-mcquaid/