Relay gold for Norway

Petter Northug produced a devastating burst of pace as the leading trio entered the stadium and coasted to the gold medal in a time of 1:30:49.2.

Eugeni Dementiev anchored the Russians to silver, an improvement of one position on their showing in Oberstdorf two years ago, over three seconds behind as he edged out Anders Södergren who had been setting the pace.

The team of sprint bronze medalist Eldar Rønning, Odd-Bjørn Hjelmeset, lead-off man in 2005, 15km champion Lars Berger and Northug earned Norway their eighth men's relay in the last nine Championships.

But Nikolai Pankratov, Vassili Rotchev and Alexander Legkov for Russia and Martin Larsson, Mathias Fredriksson and Marcus Hellner of Sweden had kept pace with the favourites over the first three legs to set up a grandstand finish.

The medalists were neck and neck for the entire race as the contest became a three-way fight on the second leg with Franz Goering losing over 20 seconds on the leaders for Germany, runners-up in the last three relays at major Championships.

That left Tobias Angerer with too much work to do although Axel Teichmann did overtake France's Alexandre Rousselet on the last leg to earn the Germans fourth place, over 50 seconds behind the winners.

The race was a disaster for Olympic champions with Roland Clara and Giorgio Di Centa combining to lose over two minutes on the first two legs and they eventually laboured home in ninth place.