Posted: 4/10/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Jakub Mosur, The Associated Press Lang Ping, head coach of the U.S. women's national volleyball team, passes the flame during the torch relay in San Francisco on Wednesday. Officials changed the torch's route to avoid protesters gathered along the planned path.

SAN FRANCISCO - The Olympic torch was diverted 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 San Francisco International Airport. Massive crowds had gathered at the waterfront to support and protest the flame.

The last-minute changes were made amid security concerns following chaotic protests over the torch in Paris and London.

Mayor Gavin Newsom told The Associated Press that the well-choreographed fake-out was prompted by the size and behavior of the crowds amassing outside AT&T Park, site of the relay's opening ceremony.

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.

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.

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 awaiting its passing. Further confusion followed, with the torch convoy apparently stopped near the bridge before heading southward to the airport, where a closing ceremony on the tarmac was planned.

As the flame traveled toward the airport, news slowly dribbled through the crowds of more than 10,000 spectators and protesters gathered at the waterfront that the torch would not be headed there.

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