The previous world champion produced a dominant experience over the 115.6km course and held off a robust late surge by Dutch nice Marianne Vos to win by one minute and 17 seconds.
“I really feel extremely proud,” Deignan, who provides the maiden Paris Roubaix to her different notable triumphs together with final 12 months’s Liege-Bastogne-Liege, stated.
“Ladies’s biking is at this turning level, and right this moment is a part of historical past. It proves the urge for food for girls’s biking and that the riders can do one of many hardest races on this planet.”
“Right this moment I used to be the third rider (within the crew) and I needed to be within the entrance on the first cobbled part to guard my leaders. However then I noticed there was a niche so I simply stored going.”
After three circuits round Denain, Trek Segafredo rider Deignan established a small lead over the pack simply earlier than the primary of 17 cobbled sections with greater than 80km remaining.
With riders struggling to prepare a concerted chase, lots of them slithering over on the greasy cobbles, former world champion Deignan powered right into a commanding lead.
With 30km remaining the Trek-Segafredo rider held a lead of two minutes 30 seconds over a bunch together with Vos (Jumbo Visma), crew mate Audrey Cordon-Ragot and Germany’s Lisa Brennauer (Ceratizit-WNT).
Deignan, dealing with the bone-shaking “pave” cobblestones with aplomb, maintained her benefit as a number of fancied riders together with European champion Ellen van Dijk crashed closely.
Vos lastly put the hammer all the way down to try to catch Deignan, slicing into the lead as she powered by way of the Carrefour de L’Arbre cobbled part.
Vos closed the hole to 1:18 as Deignan started the ultimate 10km, however Deignan proved unshakeable out entrance because the famed Roubaix velodrome end approached.
Deignan was to this point forward that the finale contained in the Roubaix velodrome resembled a lap of honor because the Yorkshire rider wrote her title into the biking historical past books.
Vos completed greater than a minute behind, with Deignan’s crew mate Elisa Longo Borghini in third place.
Organizers ASO, who additionally personal the Tour de France, added a girls’s model of the 125-year-old Paris Roubaix final 12 months, however the COVID-19 pandemic meant they needed to wait one other 12 months to experience the so-called Hell of the North.
The debut for the Paris Roubaix Femmes race and for a girls’s Tour de France subsequent 12 months are seen as steps ahead within the lengthy battle for gender equality in skilled biking, though there stays an extended strategy to go.
Whereas Sunday’s males’s race over an extended distance boasts a complete prize pot of 91,000 euros, the ladies’s race has solely 7,505 euros with Deignan receiving 1,535 euros – about 1/twentieth of what the winner of the lads’s race will take dwelling.
