1 post tagged “olympic torch”
(04-09) 20:28 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- It was an Olympic-sized fake-out, and by the end of the day, instead of the violent clashes that some had feared, the Beijing Olympic torch run left only thousands of frustrated protesters on one end of the city and mostly relieved runners and officials on the other.
The finger-pointing is bound to go on for days about whether changing the route last minute was right. But on Wednesday, Mayor Gavin Newsom and other officials said that once they got a good look mid-morning at the chanting, surging, flag-waving crowds along the torch's advertised route, they felt they had no choice.
"If we had started down that (original) route, I guarantee you would have seen helmet-clad officers with batons pushing back protesters," San Francisco Police Chief Heather Fong said.
Complaints about the bait-and-switch rang long and loud from many among the estimated 10,000 people milling along the original route all morning. Many rallied for a range of causes, such as China's human rights record and even the idea that the Olympics should be free of politics, and they viewed the torch run as an opportunity to vent their positions before a national audience focused on the torch's only stop in North America.
All anticipated a noisy, politically charged experience, perhaps even as dramatic as the demonstrations in London and Paris. Instead, the city pulled a fast one, evident from the moment the first runner emerged from AT&T Park and ducked into a cavernous warehouse on Pier 48 instead of heading up the Embarcadero as planned. Before the crowds could fully react, the torch runners soon emerged mysteriously two miles away on Van Ness Avenue and started a low-key trot northward into the Marina.
Hundreds of police officers flanked the runners on foot and on motorcycles and bicycles, but they were not needed much. The whole torch run, once the runners began their radically altered route at about 2 p.m., took less than two hours. Rather than furious clashes between protesters, there were mostly screams of support and delight at seeing the torch go by.
