“You would never wear a costume in an event like that that you hadn’t previously skated in,” she said. “But, as we all know, stuff happens.”

Still, the show must go on.

“Skaters are trained to finish their program pretty much no matter what,” DeLaney-Smith said. “There’s no stopping.”

It has been decades since skaters favored simple, modest costumes with high necklines and full skirts. Today, the couture skating costumes seen in competitions are more delicate and can cost thousands of dollars.

“It’s not for the faint of heart,” Vera Wang, who has created figure skating costumes for the last 20 years, told People magazine this month. “If one strap were to break, or if the beading on the sleeve gets caught when they turn, their whole Olympics is over. That is how serious it is. It’s absolutely nightmarish!”

At the elite level, a team of seamstresses stand by to make last-minute costume repairs, but when a wardrobe malfunction happens mid-performance, skaters have only themselves to rely on.

In her book “Only With Passion,” the German gold medalist Katarina Witt described a moment in Paris in 1987, a few months before the Calgary Olympics, when she accidentally exposed one of her breasts.

“I’d wanted to wear a costume that looked like a bustier, but it took months to be made, and when it finally arrived I didn’t have time to try it on during practice,” she wrote. “Big mistake. The top of the costume was made of elastic, and in the middle of a spin I could feel it sliding down, down, down.”