Gabby Douglas of the U.S. Olympic women’s gymnastics team found herself in a spot of bother when some viewers did not like her attitude (as in, posture) on the victory stand during the playing of the national anthem at Rio 2016.

This was after the Americans won the women’s team gold medal on Tuesday night.

Four members of the five-woman team put right hands over hearts during the Star-Spangled Banner.

The fifth was Douglas, whose arms remained at her sides.

Let’s figure out if she was out of line … or not.

A writer for the Los Angeles Times suggested Douglas was not sufficiently serious during the U.S. anthem.

He did not like that her hand was not over her heart. He also did not like that she seemed to be “slouching”.

Some in social media seemed to agree with him, particularly on the “hand-over-heart” bit, and Douglas was scolded in 140-character dollops on Twitter.

Turns out, the U.S. Olympic Committee has no guidelines on what sort of pose an athlete should strike while the anthem is going on. So Gabby Douglas was not breaking a rule, according to the USOC.

Also, does the average American put a hand over his heart during the anthem?

Not that I have noticed at, say, a Dodgers game. Some people do; many people do not.

What was going through Gabby Douglas’s mind?

We have no idea, of course.

Maybe she just forgot about the hand-on-heart. Or didn’t get the memo that the rest of the team would be doing so.

Or maybe she was distracted by being in a foul mood.

That is my guess at what happened, after watching the whole of the team competition.

Douglas in four years took an enormous fall in status and significance on the U.S. team.

In London 2012, she won the individual all-around gold medal, the highest individual prize in the sport — won for the first time by a woman of color.

That made her a celebrity, as her wiki page notes. The Wheaties box. A bio-pic. A reality TV series.

She remained active in the sport and made the team for Rio 2016, at the age of 20, but her place in the squad was not the same as it had been at London.

Simone Biles had become the team’s (and the gymnastic world’s) No. 1 athlete. The captain of the team was Aly Raisman, another veteran of 2012, like Douglas. Laurie Hernandez and Madison Kocian were interesting first-timers.

And that left Douglas, hero of 2012 … on the fringe of the team.

In the team competition, where only three of a team’s five can compete on each of the four pieces of apparatus … Douglas was called on only once.

If we were not sure of her status on the team, that hammered it home.

We also learned that Douglas had been third in qualifying for the individual all-around … but she was third behind teammates Biles and Raisman, and the Olympic Games allow only two competitors from each country.

Douglas did not have a chance to defend her title.

So, she got to the podium knowing she had contributed little to the team victory on Tuesday and that she would not be competing at all in the all-around on Thursday.

This was a dramatic comedown for someone who was a very big personality in the sport a few months ago, and she perhaps had some of that running through her head as she stood on the podium.

The Gabby Douglas body language that was talked about … well, she had very publicly been exposed over a span of a few days as yesterday’s news. How many of us would be big enough to hide that from the dozen TV cameras in the Rio arena?

She issued an explanation/apology on Wednesday, the gist of which was she “never meant any disrespect and apologize if I offended anyone” … and said she was “so overwhelmed at what our team accomplished”.

That is enough for me.

She had a hard day at the office. She did a lousy job of hiding her disappointment.

And she ran afoul of the U.S. nationalism police, who seem to want more songs with more formal presentations year after year.

The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that plays the anthem before daily sports events, even though the anthem was rarely played ahead of games before 1942. And God Bless America seems to have become a daily staple of baseball, certainly … and everyone must stand for both songs and, it would seem, put hand over heard, too, to make sure a better American is not offended.

Gabby Douglas no doubt will keep that in mind.