To be fair, there were teams with decent depth there; Russia had a shocker in the first two rounds, the pressure really got to Yurlova and then they were shooting in the middle lanes where conditions were at their worst when Bogaliy was shooting. France had decent depth - Dorin, Brunet and Bescond are all very good, and Boilley has a lot of promise, and is not really a worse selection than Gößner - plus of course Pauline Macabies has struggled on the third leg throughout the latter half of the season. Brunet has simply not been on very good form lately, and the French are more known for their shooting than their skiing on the women's side of things (obviously the Fourcade brothers make it different for the men). The French press are getting on Brunet's case about not having the endurance for the whole season and complaining that she's too thin... no, really. Norway don't look to have a bad team and neither do Sweden; with Hitzer being unwell and off form meaning Germany had to look for two people to join the Henkel/Neuner tandem (all year it's been Hitzer-Neuner-?-Henkel, with Buchholz, Bachmann and Gößner all having a go at #3)... and Bachmann probably won her way in with her performance in the Individual. Gößner is always a gamble, but when she has some spare rounds they probably think it's more worth taking.
Ukraine are pretty decent but most of the year they've been putting the Semerenko twins on legs 2 and 4; today they wanted to get themselves into a strong position early so led off with them; that meant they had their weaker skiers on the last legs. No doubt on the first leg perhaps Khvost'enko wouldn't have been outclassed on the skis so clearly as everybody's together to pace one another, and her shooting was as superb as ever. Belarus have been strong in relays all season; this isn't an obvious one-woman team like Finland or Slovakia are, but Darya Domracheva is clearly the big gun. And again, they used her on leg 2, as they have done all season (remember Oberhof, where Domracheva and Neuner started leg 2 in about 15th and 16th and finished it right up amongst the front pack, but Domracheva a few places up? Or how she came back from crashing on the first corner to silver medal yesterday? Domracheva is one of the more underappreciated athletes on the circuit, I think), meaning they had weaker skiers on the latter rounds.
Ultimately, yes, it was a horrendous mismatch on the final two laps seeing a horrifically out-of-form and out-of-favour Khvost'enko trying to hold on against a driven, powerful and in-form Neuner, but Ukraine used 4 spare rounds in the whole race; Germany used 13 AND did 2 penalty loops.
On the plus side for Germany, Miri has been pretty good in the prone pretty much every time in the last two weeks. Maybe she really IS the new Magdalena Neuner. If she achieves a quarter of what Neuner has done I think she could retire happy though.