If versatility had a face, it would probably look like Léonie Cambours. The 23-year-old champion heptathlete lives and breathes variety—both in her job as special communications advisor for our Normandy regional rail lines and in the landing pits and tracks she encounters in athletics. 

“You’re constantly seeking balance,” she explains. “At SNCF, I pivot between writing articles, running poster campaigns for our staff, and producing job descriptions for our hiring process. In a heptathlon, I need to run fast, throw far and jump high—all at the same time.”

Léonie began specializing in combined events in summer 2017, drawn by the sport’s “complexity and subtle mix of racing, throwing and jumping, where you’ve got to excel in everything.” At age 17, she’d got over the thrill of a simple high jump—a discipline embraced 9 years earlier—and felt she’d hit a “glass ceiling” in jumping. So she opted to reinvent herself with the heptathlon, a combination of 7 individual events: 100-m hurdles, 200-m and 800-m races, long jump, high jump, javelin throw, and shot put. In winter, she continued indoors with the pentathlon—a heptathlon minus the 200-m race and the javelin throw. Athletes push to score as many points as possible in each event, a quest where Léonie shines. With personal records of 4,603 points in pentathlon and 6,192 points in heptathlon, she delivered France’s 4th and 6th all-time best performances in these two combined events in the 2023 and 2021 seasons.

Just 6 months in, the precocious youngster’s strong showings in local meets brought an invitation to join the national Juniors team in February 2018. Léonie is also a competition junkie—a trait that emerged very early on. She cites a cross-country race in her first year of primary school, where she “failed” by finishing second, not first. She promised herself she’d come back and win the next year. Looking back, she explains “I shot out of the starting gate like a cannon ball. I was in the lead, but as soon as the No. 2 runner began to pass me, I stopped dead in my tracks. It was win or nothing,” she says with a smile. Keen to satisfy their daughter’s competitive streak and channel her boundless energy, her parents enrolled her in athletics. At the age of 8, young Léonie joined Amicale Yvetot Athlétisme, the club in the Normandy town where she grew up.

A few years later, she arrived at Stade Sottevillais 76 club, where her coach Wilfrid Boulineau helped her transition from high jumper to heptathlete. The titles came thick and fast, particularly in the U23 youth category, where she became France’s national women’s pentathlon champion in the indoor long jump and high jump. In 2022 she had her best season to date, with national titles that included women’s pentathlon champion in Miramas, and women’s heptathlon champion in front of hometown fans in Caen, Normandy. 
At the European Indoor Championships, Léonie placed a promising 7th—a well-deserved reward for her perseverance and gruelling training sessions. “We start with bodybuilding, weightlifting and aerobics, and then generally combine two disciplines per session,” explains Léonie. “So 100-metre hurdles followed by high jump, or shot put followed by long jump.”

Given such intense workouts, combined-event athletes focus on a limited number of meets a year. “A heptathlon isn’t like a 100-meter sprint that you can run every weekend,” says Léonie. “On average, it us takes a fortnight to recover from our 7 events.” She generally competes in 3 pentathlons in the winter and 3 heptathlons each summer.

Alongside her sporting career, Léonie wants to make the most of her degree in sports management from the university of Rouen. Already a member of Team Normandy—a group of around 20 athletes from the region—she was “drawn by SNCF Group’s historic commitment to supporting athletes,” and applied for the SNCF Athletes Programme. “SNCF’s support is not just a gimmick or a promotional pitch for the Olympic year,” she says. “It’s about real expertise that’s delivered results for over 40 years. And it gives me an opportunity to join a major company where I know I’ll be able to grow.”

So Léonie Cambours joined SNCF as part of an internal communications team in April 2023. It was a year of change that also saw her transition to a new training organization. With the agreement of Stade Sottevillais 76, she joined a heptathlete training centre in Nice on the French Riviera, with a new coach, Rudy Bourguignon. 
But she was also plagued by recurring bouts of knee pain. Doctors diagnosed damage to her patellar tendons and general inflammation. “Going up and down stairs, sitting down, crouching, driving, doing a simple squat, springing, jumping, doing two sessions in a row—all of it was a challenge, every single day,” she notes.

In early March 2024, she underwent surgery to recover both her enjoyment of sport and her full potential on the field. She took the double operation in stride, and released the news on Instagram with her sense of humour intact: “I’m getting a makeover: a  light combing of the tendons, a blow-dry of the kneecap. The works, all so I can sport this summer’s trendiest hairstyle.”

What about Paris 2024? Last spring, Léonie Cambours hadn’t given up. “I have 3 months to get back on top, and I’m aiming for 2 meets in June to make the cut.” 

But to qualify, she had to score a minimum of 6,480 points—above her personal best—or be ranked in the discipline’s top 24 athletes worldwide. Clear-eyed but still full of fighting spirit, Léonie is already looking ahead to the next Olympic Games in Los Angeles. “In 2028, I’ll be 28 years old,” she says. “That’s when heptathletes reach their full potential.”