Justin Jules (La Pomme Marseille) on the podium after winning the Grand Prix Cycliste la Marseillaise the weekend before last
By Graham Healy
Having won the opening professional race of 2013 on French soil the weekend before last, Justin Jules is a name that many Irish cycling fans had perhaps not heard before. However, the 26-year-old French man's battle to get to the top of cycling is truly an extraordinary tale.
Justin’s father Pascal had been a contemporary of Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche, and had won a stage of the Tour de France in 1984. However, Pascal developed a reputation for being a bit of a rebel, and would end up falling out with his manager Cyrille Guimard.
One of his best friends in the peloton was two-time Tour de France winner Laurent Fignon and Jules prophetically told him: ‘You’ll see, I’ll die young. I won’t get past thirty.’
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In 1987 Jules had played in a charity football match and on the way home he fell asleep at the wheel, crashed and was killed. He was only 26.
When he died his son Justin was just 13 months-old. He would go on to follow in his father’s footsteps, and showed great talent as a junior. It looked like he also might go on to turn professional.
However, his traumatic personal life would thwart him from achieving this ambition.
After the death of his father, Jules’ mother married René Caufield. As a stepfather he would turn out to be alcoholic and abusive. On the evening of December 18th, 2004, René arrived home drunk, and Justin could hear him downstairs verbally abusing both his mother and his elder brother, Sébastien.
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Justin had had enough. He ran downstairs to see his stepfather punching his brother in the face. He sprayed René in the face with tear gas, before the two brothers bundled him out of the house. Justin then struck him with a brush handle, before reaching for an iron bar with which he struck his stepfather on the back of the head.
The police arrived a few minutes later to find René lying dead in a pool of blood. Justin and Sébastien immediately confessed. Justin denied that he had intended to kill his stepfather.
It would take four years for the trial to go to court. His court case would be heard in Val d’Oise, where the prosecution had sought for him to be sentenced to 12 years in prison.
However, the jury felt that he did not intend to kill Caufield, and so received a reduced term of three years for manslaughter.
He was released from prison the following year and despite his incarceration he was quickly able to get back to racing in France. In 2011 he was signed by VC La Pomme Marseille, the club in the south of France where so many Irish riders have enjoyed success.
He won a stage of the Tour of Hainan that year, but it seems that this year is when he could really make his breakthrough.
The weekend before last he outsprinted the likes of Samuel Dumoulin (Ag2R) to win the European season-opening pro race, Grand Prix Cycliste la Marseillaise. And since then he has also finished in the top 10 in two stages of Etoile de Bessèges.
Justin Jules is a name we expect to hear more of as the season progresses.
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