SAN FRANCISCO — The Golden Gate Bridge and famed cable cars won’t serve as a backdrop for the 2016 Olympics. San Francisco dropped out of the running for the Summer Games, leaving Los Angeles and Chicago as the only possible American candidates.

San Francisco abandoned its Olympic bid yesterday after plans for a new bayfront stadium collapsed when the city’s NFL team said it intended to move to Silicon Valley.

The owner of the San Francisco 49ers, John York, told city officials last week he was breaking off negotiations for a new stadium at Candlestick Point and was considering a move to Santa Clara.

“There’s been a tremendous amount of uncertainty created around the stadium process which has made our bid untenable,” a spokesman for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Peter Ragone, said.

A managing director and chief executive officer of the San Francisco 2016 Bid Committee, Scott Givens, said the 49ers’ decision created a “perceptual gap” that hurt the city’s reputation in the eyes of the Olympic committee.

“The damage has been done and the damage can’t be pulled back,” he said.

The International Olympic Committee will select the host city in 2009. Madrid, Spain; New Delhi; Prague, Czech Republic; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Rome; and Tokyo are among those to have expressed interest. The Summer Olympics will be in Beijing in 2008 and London in 2012.

The 49ers said yesterday they had encouraged the bid committee not to build its entire proposal around a new 49ers stadium at Candlestick Point. Still, members of the city’s Olympic organizing panel were jolted by the team’s decision.

“We’re numb and we’re very disappointed at the recent turn of events,” a committee member who won a swimming gold medal in the 1960 Games, Anne Cribbs, said.

Following last week’s announcement, the committee said it would try to find a new location for marquee events, including the opening and closing ceremonies and track and field competition.

But the options they considered — including modifying AT&T Park, home of baseball’s San Francisco Giants; expanding Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park; or building a new stadium at Candlestick Point without the 49ers’ help — all proved unworkable, Givens said.

The U.S. Olympic Committee is eager to avoid a repeat of New York’s failed 2012 Olympics bid. Financing for the New York stadium fell apart about a month before the final vote, and the city didn’t get nearly the votes it needed to host the games.