SAN FRANCISCO -- The first torchbearer held the Olympic flame aloft triumphantly. She waved to the crowd and set off -- and promptly ran into a warehouse.
Faced with thousands of anti-China protesters, authorities pulled a bait-and-switch routine Wednesday on the crowds who turned out to see the flame on its only North American stop.
San Francisco officials had warned that security concerns -- prompted by chaotic demonstrations earlier this week in London and Paris -- might prompt last-minute changes to the planned route along the waterfront.
But the scope of their hide-and-seek contingency plan became apparent at the end of the brief opening ceremony, when the first smiling athlete, Chinese Olympian Lin Li, carried the newly lit torch inside the nearby warehouse and vanished from public view.
The flame re-emerged a half-hour later after having been spirited away in a caravan of buses amid heavy security. Two-person teams emerged from the buses and spent a little more than an hour passing the torch far from the assembled crowds before it was finally taken to the airport and put on a plane without a formal goodbye.
"Trains, planes and automobiles -- it was kind of a screwball comedy," said Jerry Fowler, president of the Save Darfur Coalition, who was among the thousands who lined the waterfront expecting to see the torch. "We were hearing all these reports that it was on a bus, it was on a boat, everything except parading it in front of people where they can see it."
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| Hundreds of protesters march in San Francisco. (AP) |
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 torch.
Shortly before the opening ceremony began, officials cut the original six-mile route nearly in half. As it made its way through the streets of San Francisco, the flame traveled in switchbacks and left the crowds confused and waiting for a parade that never arrived. Protesters also hurriedly changed plans and chased the rerouted flame.
"We started running. We hitchhiked with some guy who crammed six of us in the back of a truck," said Psering Tenzin, 19, a young Tibetan carrying a large flag. He said that when he and a friend tried to step into the street to stop the procession, police pushed them.
Officials drove the Olympic torch about a mile inland and handed it off to two runners away from protesters and media, and they began jogging toward the Golden Gate Bridge, in the opposite direction of the crowds waiting for it. More confusion followed, with the torch convoy apparently stopped near the bridge before heading southward to the airport.
As the flame traveled toward the airport, news dribbled through the crowds of more than 10,000 spectators and protesters gathered at the waterfront that the torch wasn't coming there.
Spectator Dave Dummer said he was disappointed.
