L'Equipe releases Tour de France photo archive app for iPhone & iPad

French newspaper L’Equipe has trawled its unparalleled archive of Tour de France photographs for a new iPhone and iPad app released this week, with a fortnight to go until the 100th edition of the race gets under way on Corisca. Some of its pictures are also featured in an open-air exhibition on the railings of the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris.

Zoom by L’Equipe – Images of the Tour costs £2.99 to download from the Apple App Store, and requires your iPhone or iPad to be running iOS 6. There’s no news of whether there are plans for an Android version.

The hundreds of pictures are sorted by theme, and while there are some of the usual clichés – sunflowers, anyone? – because they’re from L’Equipe, the likelihood is that those of us in the Anglophone world at least won’t have seen many of them.

The screengrabs below are from the iPad version, there are also screengrabs from the iPhone app in the gallery above.

Meanwhile, at the same time as an anti-doping hearing at the French Senate in recent weeks has seen ex-pros such as Laurent Jalabert be the subject of a good grilling, the grilles – railings – of the Jardin du Luxembourg which surrounds the palace where the Senate sits has been adorned by an exhibition of some of L’Equipe’s pictures.

The exhibition, at the northeast corner of the park close to the Boulevard St Michel and open until 27 July, is well worth a look if you’re in Paris over the next few weeks. Certainly if you’re there for the final day of the Tour, that late afternoon start of the closing stage will give you plenty of time to head across to the Rive Gauche to catch it.