Tears and sobs, and not just from Valieva, follow the skater’s crushing Olympic end.

“I was feeling a lot of pleasure because I happened to be in the right time and the right place and did the right things — that’s the important thing,” Shcherbakova said. But she quickly, added, “On the other hand, I feel this emptiness inside.”

On NBC, Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir called the scenes around the end of the competition “heartbreaking” and “devastating,” and made clear, over and over, as they waited for Valieva’s scores that they believed it had been unfair — to Valieva, to the other skaters, to viewers around the world — for the 15-year-old to have competed, and especially under the crushing weight of scandal and expectations and everything else.

“She should not have been allowed to skate in this Olympic event,” said Lipinski, a former gold medalist in the event. She added that it had made her angry that the adults around Valieva didn’t “make better decisions.”

“It’s not fair,” Lipinski said as the sobs played out on the screen, for a 15-year-old to have dealt with all of this.

Her colleague Johnny Weir posted a video to his Instagram story soon after the broadcast ended, calling the night the “most bizarre and heartbreaking event I have seen in my entire life.”

“I hope that it is never repeated,” Weir said.

Adam Rippon, who coaches the American Mariah Bell, who finished 10th, used an expletive on Twitter to describe the chaotic end to the competition. And on Russian state television, the commentator Andrei Zhuranko thundered, “Sports officials, you have broken the most talented figure skater in the world.”

Ivan Nechepurenko, Ilya Gurevich and Ilaria Parogni contributed reporting.