Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Flamer moved to undisclosed location…

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The Olympic torch was rerouted away from thousands of demonstrators and spectators who crowded the city’s waterfront Wednesday to witness the flame’s symbolic journey to the Beijing Games. The planned closing ceremony at the San Francisco Bay waterfront was canceled and another one was planned at an undisclosed location. Massive crowds had gathered at the waterfront to support and protest the flame.

The last-minute changes were prompted by security concerns following chaotic torch protests in Paris and London.

Mayor Gavin Newsom told The Associated Press that the well choreographed fake-out was prompted by the size of the crowds amassing outside AT&T Park, site of the relay’s opening ceremony and whether they try to mob the torch bearers.

There was “a disproportionate concentration of people in and around the start of the relay,” he said in a phone interview, while traveling in a caravan that accompanied the teams of relay walkers on its alternate course. “We felt by the time we got everybody on the sidewalks, too much time would have passed.”

Less than an hour before the relay began, officials cut the original six-mile route nearly in half.

Then, at the opening ceremony, the first torchbearer took the flame from a lantern brought to the stage and held it aloft before running into a warehouse. A motorcycle escort departed, but the torchbearer was nowhere in sight.

Newsom said a closing ceremony would take place, but would not say where. He also would not reveal the exact torch route.

Many spectators were disappointed and angered by the route change.

Chi Zhang, a software engineer from Sunnyvale, waited to see the torch since 10 a.m. He shook his head sadly four hours later when he heard the route had been changed.

“That’s surprising,” he said. “We were very excited about this. This was supposed to be the only stop in the United States. I took a day off work to be here.”

There were signs of tension even before the torch relay began. Pro- Tibet and pro-China groups were given side-by-side permits to demonstrate, and representatives from both sides spilled from their sanctioned sites across a major street and shouted at each other nose to nose, with no visible police presence to separate them.

“A lot of Tibetan people are getting killed,” said Kunga Yeshi, 18, who had traveled here from Salt Lake City. “The Chinese said they’d change if they got the Olympics, but they still won’t change.”

Farther along the planned route, about 200 Chinese college students mobbed a car carrying two people waving Tibetan flags in front of the city’s Pier 39 tourist destination. The students, who arrived by bus from the University of California, Davis, banged drums and chanted “Go Olympics” in Chinese.

“I’m proud to be Chinese and I’m outraged because there are so many people who are so ignorant they don’t know Tibet is part of China,” Yi Che said. “It was and is and will forever be part of China.”

Hundreds of pro-China and pro-Tibet demonstrators blew whistles and waved flags as they faced off near site of the relay’s opening ceremony. Police struggled to keep the groups apart. At least one protester was detained, and officers blocked public access to bridge leading to the ceremony site across McCovey Cove from the ballpark.

One of the runners who planned to carry the torch dropped out earlier this week because of safety concerns, officials said. The torch bearers will compete not only with people protesting China’s grip on Tibet, but its support for the governments of Myanmar and Sudan.

Local officials say they support the diversity of viewpoints, but have tightened security following chaotic protests during the torch’s stops in London and Paris and a demonstration Monday in which activists hung banners from the Golden Gate bridge.

Vans were deployed to haul away arrested protesters, and the FAA restricted flights over the city to media helicopters, medical emergency carriers and law enforcement aircraft. Law enforcement agencies erected metal barricades and readied running shoes, bicycles and motorcycles for officers preparing to shadow the runners.

Meanwhile Wednesday, the White House said anew that Bush would attend the Olympics, but left open the possibility that he would skip the opening ceremonies. Asked whether Bush would go to that portion of the games, White House press secretary Dana Perino demurred, citing the fluid nature of a foreign trip schedule this far out and the many factors that go into devising it.

“I would again reiterate that the president has been very clear that he believes that the right thing for him to do is to continue to press the Chinese on a range of issues, from human rights and democracy, political speech freedoms and religious tolerance, and to do that publicly and privately, before, during and after the Olympics,” she said.