Fresh off his podium finish at the European championships and appearance at his first Olympics, the 21-year-old from Estonia wants to turn the promising results he earned in his first two years as a pro into big wins during the season ahead. He cannot wait to join his new EF Pro Cycling teammates.

“I am super happy with this move,” Madis says. “It is the right next step for me to make as a cyclist. EF Education-EasyPost looks like a team with a great environment and atmosphere between the riders and the staff. I'm really looking forward to next season.”

EF Pro Cycling founder and CEO Jonathan Vaughters is excited to have Madis on our squad.

“At 21, Madis has already gone top ten at Paris-Roubaix and finished third at the European championships,” Vaughters says. “He is a proven pro race winner with the strength to go toe to toe with the best in the cobbled classics and the sprint to finish the job. He is only going to get better from here. It is going to be fun to see what Madis can do with our team in the coming years.”

Madis's favorite races are the northern classics. He loves racing in the wind and muck in Belgium and France and flies over the cobblestones. He thrives at high speed, brushing elbows with his competitors on the roughest, smallest roads. But Madis' ambitions will never stop after he's rounded the last corner of the Roubaix velodrome. He wants to go for wins throughout the year. One-day races, stages in the biggest tours—he wants to cross their finish lines first. He has already won stages at the Deutschland Tour and the Tour of Estonia. He rode his first Giro this season. Now, he wants to step up his game.

“It's not that I just have one race in mind,” Madis says. “I want to win next year. I just want to get into a winning mode. I love hard races. I'm never the fastest guy in pure, pure bunch sprints when everybody there is fresh. That's why I love harder racing, where I can go for the sprint in the end.”

Madis honed his speed on the BMX track, where he raced until he was 15. He's always been an athlete. He started competitive swimming at four years old and did all kinds of sports when he was a kid. He was pretty good at them all, but it was on a bike that he started to dream of being great.

“I rode my first races when I was eight,” Madis says. “I immediately started to win in the youth categories and discovered that I had talent. That gave me a lot of motivation. When I was young, I was a half-time BMX racer and half-time road rider. At a certain point, I had to decide which one I was going to focus on. I took part in some road races and cyclocross races, but was mostly focused on BMX until I was 15. BMX racing is super, super explosive. For sure, it helped me to become the rider that I am on the road, with all the racing for position, having to have no fear.”

Madis balances his need for speed and rough-and-tumble racing with a quiet life in Estonia. He was born and raised in Tartu and, despite his home country's harsh winters, still opts to live there, though he has recently moved to Tallinn, the capital. He enjoys spinning out into the forests on his bike, passing lakes and rivers on quiet, smooth, nearly car-free roads. Before the thermometer dips too far below freezing and the snowplows come out, he can always escape somewhere warm. As soon as the ice is gone, he wants to go home, where he can fish for pike in fresh, clean water.

“For me, Estonia is such a good country, except for the winter,” Madis says. “It's a really good place to train, maybe not for a climber, but for a rider like me. We don't have big climbs, but we do have super good roads with no traffic. It's all rolling hills and rivers and lakes.”

That's where Madis will start to prepare for 2025, before meeting his teammates for the first time at our winter camp in Spain. The whole team is looking forward to welcoming him into our ranks.

The 2025 season is going to be even more exciting with Madis on our roster.