TESERO, Italy, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Norway won the Olympic women's 4x7.5km cross-country skiing relay on Saturday as favourites Sweden recovered to take silver after suffering a number of early falls.
Finland claimed bronze for their second medal of the Games. Norway claimed victory by nearly 51 seconds, with Astrid Oeyre Slind taking advantage of a fall by Sweden's Ebba Andersson on an uphill climb to create a wide gap.
“I actually didn’t realise there was so much drama. They were just ahead of us, but I wasn’t paying much attention. I could see we had a really good gap, so we hoped for the gold already," Slind said.
The Swedes started as clear favourites, having swept all the gold medals in the women's cross-country events at this Games.
They had a commanding lead at the start of the race, led by Linn Svahn, but Andersson endured two big falls in the second leg of the competition, at one point doing a front flip and losing a ski to cost them over a minute and 20 seconds.
"There was quite a lot of stress early on because of that first fall, and I became far too passive on the downhill," Andersson said.
"It kind of triggered a chain of events, three falls because of the changing conditions. It swings quickly, and decisions have to be made fast. It was a nightmare for me personally. I snowploughed too much on the downhills. Like I said, I became a bit too cautious, a bit too tired to act smartly in the moment."
Frida Karlsson, Sweden's strongest skier and twice gold-medal winner at these Games, made up significant time on the third lap, moving them into fourth position from eighth.
Anchor Jonna Sundling battled it out with Finland for much of the final race segment until pulling away near the end.
"It’s a great feeling. We’ve been fourth as a team many times, and I’ve lost in the last 100m many times, so today I wanted to make sure we don’t need to battle for that," said Jasmi Joensuu, who took the last lap for Finland.
The competition was marked by multiple crashes from the start, as skiers dealt with rain and slush, making the classic portion of the race, where racers mostly ski inside set tracks, particularly challenging.
The U.S., led by Jessie Diggins, came in fifth.
(Reporting by Liz Hampton and Tommy Lund in Tesero, Italy; Editing by Alison Williams, Ken Ferris and Ed Osmond)
