It is the fifth Dutch gold medal in four days of competition and is the first European title for Pieters on the road following her World Championships victory on the track in the madison earlier this year.

Pieters withstood appalling weather conditions, which caused the start of the 115 kilometres race featuring 10 laps of an 11.5km circuit to be delayed by half-an-hour for safety checks to be made to the course.

She eventually won the race in 2 hours 56mins 3sec, as Elena Cecchini of Italy took the silver medal, with bronze going to Germany's Lisa Klein.

The trio built up a lead of two minutes over the peloton at one stage, and even though it tightened up towards the end there was still a gap of 25 seconds to fourth-placed Lorena Weibes of The Netherlands in the final standings.

Klein led into the final 500m, however it was Pieters who opened up the sprint and her two pursuers could not quite catch up.

The 28-year-old said after her win: "This is really special, because it's close to my home. 

"It was a really hard race, early in the race with the whole national team we started in the first lap, and we kept going.

"We had a hard head wind and also with the houses a lot of side wind, it was a really hard race."

Earlier, Italy's Alberto Dainese won the gold medal in the men's under-23 road race, leading home a mass sprint to claim victory in an overall time of 3:08.53.

Dainese crossed the line at the end of the 138km course – 12 laps of the 11.5km circuit – ahead of Danish rider Niklas Larsen and Rait Arm of Estonia.

Before the men's race, a minute's silence was observed in memory of Bjorg Lambrecht, the Belgian rider who died in a crash at the Tour de Pologne earlier this week.

Tomorrow is set to see the final day of the Championships, with the men's elite road race concluding the competition.