Pauline Ferrand-Prévot takes a sensational home victory at Paris-Roubaix Femmes

Frenchwoman wins her Hell of the North debut as Letizia Borghesi takes second place and Lorena Wiebes is third

Pauline Ferrand-Prévot celebrates victory on the Roubaix velodrome
Pauline Ferrand-Prévot takes victory on her Paris-Roubaix debut
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Visma-Lease a Bike) took a sensational solo victory at Paris-Roubaix Femmes avec Zwift on Saturday, finishing 58 seconds clear of Letizia Borghesi (EF Education-Oatly) in the famous velodrome.

She had attacked 25km from home, while Lorena Wiebes (SD Worx-Protime) outsprinted Ferrand-Prevot’s teammate Marianne Vos for third place.

A Roubaix debutant, Ferrand-Prévot only got her first taste of the cobbles during her team’s recon of the course earlier this week and admitted in the aftermath of her victory that she’d been sick in the two days leading into the race. She added that she only took the decision to start hours before it got under way. ‘This may be the best victory of my career,’ she said in her post-race interview.

That first taste of the pavé stirred the peloton into action, and the deficit on the two escapees began to tumble. With 70km remaining, Ellen van Dijck attacked after her Lidl-Trek teammate Lizzie Deignan had set the pace in the peloton through the first cobbled sections.

Over the next dozen or so kilometres, Kopecky kept probing for weakness amidst her rivals, her frequent accelerations splitting the lead group but never giving her a significant advantage, with Vos always very quick to respond. The stop-start action at the front eventually allowed the Ferrand-Prévot group to rejoin the frontrunners.

With 25km left, Ferrand-Prévot took advantage of a short rise to jump clear. The Visma-Lease a Bike rider bridged up to Norsgaard coming out of section 6, where the pair led by 15 seconds and extended this lead as the bunch hesitated once again. Going into section 5 at Camphin-en-Pévèle their advantage was 30 seconds.

Racing through this section, the multi-talented Ferrand-Prévot, a world champion on the road, gravel, mountain bike and in cyclo-cross, edged away from Norsgaard and had 40 seconds on the peloton coming out of it. She continued to gain ground on the infamous Carrefour de l’Arbre section that followed, teammate Vos marking all of the moves behind.

Coming out of section 3, the Frenchwoman led the favourites by a minute and she maintained this gap into the velodrome despite a flurry of attacks. The chasers managed to reel in Norsgaard, but Ferrand-Prévot flew on to add another historic victory to her illustrious palmarès.

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Peter Cossins has been writing about professional cycling since 1993, with his reporting appearing in numerous publications and websites including Cycling WeeklyCycle Sport and Procycling - which he edited from 2006 to 2009. Peter is the author of several books on cycling - The Monuments, his history of cycling's five greatest one-day Classic races, was published in 2014, followed in 2015 by Alpe d’Huez, an appraisal of cycling’s greatest climb. Yellow Jersey - his celebration of the iconic Tour de France winner's jersey won the 2020 Telegraph Sports Book Awards Cycling Book of the Year Award.

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