Gavin Sherry Ran for Stanford. Now He Has a WorldTour Cycling Deal

Gavin Sherry was still racing cross country for Stanford last fall. Now he has signed a professional cycling contract that will take him to the WorldTour, cycling’s top tier, in 2027, less than a year after his first bike race.

EF Education-Aevolo, the American under-23 team run by Jonathan Vaughters, announced the signing on July 31. Sherry, 22, from West Hartford, Connecticut, joins the development squad immediately and is set to move up to the WorldTour team, EF Education-EasyPost, next year. He made his debut for the team at the Kreiz Breizh Elites stage race in France.

Before the bike, Sherry was a serious runner. Out of Conard High in West Hartford, he was one of the top American high school distance runners of his class and a Gatorade Connecticut athlete of the year, and at Stanford he ran 3:50.03 for 1,500m and 14:31.86 for 5,000m. Injuries kept interrupting that career. By his own account he was hurt through his freshman, sophomore, and junior years and had to keep rebuilding his fitness from nothing, and he took up cycling as cross-training while he healed. He was still on Stanford’s cross country roster into the fall of 2025, the same season he began entering bike races.

The switch took quickly. Riding in the hills around the Bay Area, Sherry found he had the aerobic engine for it. “My first time on a bike out there was life-changing,” he said. Aerobic fitness carries from running to the bike, though not perfectly. He raced his first amateur events, Category 5, at the end of 2025, and reached Category 1, the top amateur level, by the spring. On a borrowed bike, he took the record on Old La Honda Road, a well-known Bay Area climb, which drew the attention of scouts and agents.

His results this year backed up the story. Riding for the United States national team, Sherry finished second overall at the Oberösterreich Rundfahrt, an under-23 stage race in Austria, and second on its opening stage. He was 11th among under-23 riders at the Peace Race, won a domestic road race at Pine Flat in February, and finished 20th in the elite men’s race at the U.S. national championships.

Vaughters’ organization has made this bet before. Michael Woods was a Canadian miler fast enough to run a sub-four-minute mile before a recurring foot fracture ended his running. He turned to cycling in his mid-twenties, rode for Vaughters’ team, finished seventh overall at the 2017 Vuelta a Espana, and became a Tour de France stage winner and a fifth-place finisher in the Tokyo Olympic road race, the first person to both run a sub-four mile and finish the Tour de France.

Sherry still has gaps to close. He has ridden a time trial bike for only about 40 minutes, and Kreiz Breizh opened with a team time trial. He calls himself a climber, strongest on efforts of 10 to 15 minutes, and says he is still building his shorter, punchier power. The rest of his 2026 program has not been announced. The move to the WorldTour comes in 2027.