FÜSSEN – Anette Norberg missed out on the 2006 Le Gruyère European Curling Championships. She made no mistakes in the eight-day 2007 edition.

Norberg added an unprecedented seventh European title to her resume – and the sixth in the last seven years for her current team, the 2006 Olympic champions and two-time World champions – with a 9-4 win over Scotland's Kelly Wood.

"It's wonderful," said Norberg.

"We had a bad Worlds after such a great season last year. We wanted to come back and show everyone we are still on the top."

Despite a stellar cashspiel season last year the team had not pre-qualified for the 2006 Europeans in Basel, and then they missed the medal podium at the 2007 women's Worlds in Aomori, Japan last March. Wood scored her first medal at that championship – a bronze – and after clambering into the fourth and final playoff spot on Wednesday night, turned up her game to make the Euro final.

But she couldn't deliver in the finale.

"It feels much worse because we didn't play well," said Wood.

"Jackie (Lockhart) and I didn't play well and that's disappointing. Out front end was great, but Jacks and I weren't quite there today.

"We would have liked to have to play your best, that's what competition is all about. That's why you play."

Indeed, the Scottish front end of Lindsay Wood and Lorna Vevers outshot Sweden's Anna Svård and Cathrine Lindahl by an average of eight percentage points. But Wood and third Lockhart clocked 63 and 69 per cent to Norberg's 73 and Swedish third Eva Lund's 78.

Lund was competing in her first tournament of the season: she gave birth to her daughter, Anna, just 10 weeks ago.

Wood was pleased to score her first international silver medal.

"I've gone so many years without a medal and now I've got two in the same year," Wood said.

"I know gold is looming somewhere."

Denmark's Lene Nielsen surprised observers with the bronze medal. Her team has an average age of only 21 years. 

The top seven teams qualified for the Ford World Curling Championships in Vernon, Canada in March 2008. The eighth team, Czech Republic, won a Challenge series against the European B-Division champions, England, to grab Europe's eighth and final Worlds berth.

The bottom two teams – Austria and Finland – will drop to next year's Euro B-Division, with England and the Netherlands, the B-Division runner-up, jumping to the 2008 A-Division.

The 2008 Le Gruyère European Curling Championships will be hosted December 6-13 in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden.

Nations earn points from the World championships to qualify for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, making the Le Gruyère European Championships – and it's eight World berths – the most important European curling event of the season.

The men's championship final between Norway's Thomas Ulsrud and Scotland's David Murdoch can be seen live at 12:00 GMT on Eurosport, and also live on the internet at Eurosport.com and CurlTV.com.

FINAL STANDINGS (WOMEN)

Country - Win/Loss Record - Result

SWEDEN - 10-1 - Gold medal, Worlds qualification

SCOTLAND - 8-4 - Silver medal, Worlds qualification

DENMARK - 8-3 - Bronze medal, Worlds qualification

SWITZERLAND (Mirjam Ott) - 7-3 - Worlds qualification

RUSSIA (Ludmila Privivkova) - 5-4 - Worlds qualification

ITALY (Diana Gaspari) - 3-6 - Worlds qualification

GERMANY Andrea Schoepp) - 3-6 - Worlds qualification

CZECH REPUBLIC (Katerina Urbanova) - 3-7 - Worlds qualification

AUSTRIA (Claudia Toth) - 2-8 - 2008 Euro B-Division

FINLAND (Anne Malmi) - 1-8 - 2008 Euro B-Division