The 21-year-old Canadian from Oakville, Ontario, wants to show what he can do in the hardest one-day classics and earn a spot to race his first grand tour. He is already going into his fourth season as a pro and brings WorldTour-proven power and experience beyond his years. The team’s attacking style and willingness to break from convention drew Michael to the squad.

“This team has a unique identity,” Michael says. “Even growing up, watching the sport, it seemed like a team with an exciting culture. It is a team that you always see on the attack, being opportunistic, and giving riders the space to express themselves and race in ways that suit them, so they can take the best advantage of situations on the road. It's a team that definitely gets the best out of its riders. You see riders who might not fit in other places perform really strongly on this team.”

After three years in a support role, Michael is ready to come into his own. His rise to the WorldTour was rapid. He started out competing in kids’ triathlons and got into bike racing at the Mattamy National Cycling Centre, a velodrome built near his hometown for the 2015 Pan American Games.

“That is what launched me,” Michael says. “We had a really good group of riders and coaches and a really positive dynamic. A lot of people from my cohort have been successful on the road and the track. That velodrome was definitely the center of my development as a kid. It is how I got into the sport.”

Once he got going, Michael began racing on the road as well as the boards. He excelled in Canada’s junior ranks and was soon ready to take on international competition.

“I had the opportunity to come to Europe and start racing with the Toronto Hustle development team,” Michael says. “And then I got the opportunity to move full-time to Italy as a second-year junior, and I grabbed that with both hands, because it was where I wanted to go in my career and in my life. The transition was hard, to be honest. Nobody in my city or on my team really spoke English. But it was also really cool because it was an opportunity to be fully immersed in Italian cycling culture. There were so many people on the team who had been in cycling for so long. It was a place where I could learn so much. For me, being in Italy, being part of that culture, and going to races every weekend was living the dream.”

Michael’s strong junior results earned him his first WorldTour contract. His step up to the big leagues was a big one, but he managed it well, despite breaking his hip at the start of his second season.

“I'd actually say that injury gave me an opportunity to reevaluate my approach to the sport and different things I was doing in training,” Michael says. “It gave my body the opportunity to reset, to finish growing a bit, and to absorb the demands of the previous year. By the time I got back to racing that year, even considering how much I'd missed, I was almost immediately better than I had been the year before. Since then, it has been a continuous upward trajectory. I've managed to fit in well, supporting the team in some of the bigger races.”

Michael has shown that he can be more than a helper. He is the reigning Canadian time trial champion. In 2024, he won a stage at the Tour de l’Avenir—under-23 racing’s Tour de France—and has since earned very promising results in tough, hilly WorldTour stage races.

“Last year, Michael won the opening time trial at the Tour de l’Avenir,” says EF Pro Cycling founder and CEO Jonathan Vaughters. “It was a short prologue. One of the things I've always looked for in very young riders is their ability to do short time trials. There is an old expression in sports physiology: you can always make a miler into a marathoner, but you can never make a marathoner into a miler. That TT got me thinking, ‘Okay, this is a good sign that he's got the fundamental super-high-VO2-max motor. I think this guy can do something big for us.’ Michael doesn't have any big results in the pros just yet. He had to work a lot during his first three years. I think that our team will be a big reset for him. He is a time trialist who can also climb and is quite handy in a breakaway. He can get his body down really low and produce power on the road bike all day and he brings that double trouble in that he can climb too, so he can actually finish the job on the final climbs once he gets in a breakaway.”

Michael is now focused on keeping his momentum rolling. He wants to make the most of his talent. To do that, he is concentrating on the day-to-day work of getting faster.

“I'm not somebody who's super driven by a specific number or a specific race or a specific result, but I want to be somebody who's consistently animating the biggest races,” he says. “I want to be someone who's consistently up there fighting for stages, fighting to support teammates, always showing myself really well. That's what I want for my career. And then at the end, I want to look back and feel that I achieved everything I could have.”

When he is at home at his European base in Andorra, Michael enjoys playing the piano and reading history books. We think he can write his own chapters of cycling history with EF Education-EasyPost.