“This is not a step forward for women’s rights,” Aziza al-Yousef, a computer science professor who is a leader in the Saudi women’s right-to-drive movement, said in her house in Riyadh. “We’ve been asking for girls to play sports in school for years; here they give Saudi women a spot in the Olympics, but not the right to earn a place on the team. This doesn’t add anything, and it won’t change anything.”

Lina al-Maeena, the founder of a women’s basketball league in Jeddah, said she believed that even a symbolic gesture could lead to improvement and predicted that Saudi women would be allowed to train for the next Olympic Games. “These moments break down stereotypes,” she said. “I can see the other side of the argument, but I choose to focus on the positive. American women had to struggle in the 1970s for equal opportunity, and that’s where we are now.”

Nobody thinks the Saudi Olympic committee is in a hurry to break down barriers.

Shaherkani and Sarah Attar, a Pepperdine University student who has dual citizenship and will run in the 800 meters, were included only after the International Olympic Committee threatened to bar all Saudi athletes if the team did not include women. Brunei and Qatar, which had also barred female athletes in past Olympics, were quick to give in to the I.O.C.’s arm-twisting. Saudi resistance gave the story more zest overseas.

Western news media outlets gave the brief judo match live — and lively — coverage. So did many Arab ones. The Saudi news media were much more subdued. Timing was part of it. The Olympics coincide with Ramadan, a monthlong religious holiday of prayer and fasting, and Shaherkani began her competition not long after the midday call to prayer. The elimination match in the 172-pound-plus category was shown live on at least one Al Jazeera sports channel and on the Internet, but it went unnoticed on major Saudi television news programs, which focused on Ramadan prayer in Mecca and the strife in Syria.

Mostly, Olympic coverage was left to Twitter, which is uncensored in Saudi Arabia. For the days leading to the match, cyber chatter obsessed on whether Shaherkani would be allowed to compete in a traditional hijab head dress (she was). Then Twitter wags bet on what kind of hijab she would wear. She chose a tight black cap that covered her ears but not her neck and did not mollify her most exacting critics.