page_title: L'Équipe
section_title: L'Équipe
hierarchical_section_title: L'Équipe / History / L'Équipe
context_page_description: L'Équipe is a French nationwide daily newspaper devoted to sport, owned by Éditions Philippe Amaury. The paper is noted for coverage of association football, rugby, motorsport and cycling. Its predecessor was L'Auto, a general sports paper whose name reflected not any narrow interest but the excitement of the time in car racing.
  L'Auto originated the Tour de France cycling stage race in 1903 as a circulation booster. The race leader's yellow jersey was instituted in 1919, probably to reflect the distinctive yellow newsprint on which L'Auto was published. The competition that would eventually become the UEFA Champions League was also the brainchild of a l'Équipe journalist, Gabriel Hanot.
context_section_description: In 1940 Jacques Goddet succeeded Desgrange as editor and nominal organiser of the Tour de France (although he refused German requests to run it during the war, see Tour de France during the Second World War). Jacques Goddet was the son of L'Auto's first financial director, Victor Goddet. Goddet defended his paper's role in a court case brought by the French government but was never wholly cleared in the public mind of being close to the Germans or to the Head of the French State, Philippe Pétain.
  Goddet could point, however, to clandestine printing of Resistance newspapers and pamphlets in the L'Auto print room and so was allowed to publish a successor paper called L'Équipe. It occupied premises across the road from where L'Auto had been, in a building that had actually been in owned by L'Auto, although the original paper's assets had been sequestrated by the state. One condition of publication imposed by the state was that L'Équipe was to use white paper rather than yellow, which was too closely attached to L'Auto.
  The new paper published three times a week from 28 February 1946. Since 1948 it has been published daily. The paper benefited from the demise of its competitors, L'Élan, and Le Sport. Its coverage of car racing hints at the paper's ancestry by printing the words L'Auto at the head of the page in the gothic print used in the main title of the prewar paper.
  L'Équipe is published in broadsheet format.
caption: Maurice Garin, winner of the first Tour de France
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