HTC-Highroad, one of cycling's most successful teams, will close its doors at the end of the season.
It leaves Australians Matt Goss, Mark Renshaw and Leigh Howard to find new jobs.
Both Renshaw from Bathurst, NSW and Howard, 21, from Geelong, were under contract for next year.
All three are now expected to be a target for the Gerry Ryan-back GreenEdge consortium out of Melbourne looking to join the UCI World Tour in January.
It comes with news today, GreenEdge announded their first signings, rising track and road stars Jack Bobrdige from Gawler, South Australia, along with brothers Cameron and Travis Meyer from Perth from the Garmin-Cervelo squad.
Earlier in the week the first crack in the HTC armada appeared with news of Slovak brothers Martin and Peter Velits joining Belgium rivals Quick Step.
Bob Stapleton, owner of HTC-Highroad, announced overnight that he was unable to secure a new sponsorship partner to carry the team forward at the competitive and ethical level that he and his staff wanted.
The team has just come off one of its most successful Tour de France campaigns in its six years in the peloton, winning six stages, with the Manx Missile, Mark Cavendish, grabbing five and taking the green sprinter's jersey for the first time.
Though negotiations with potential sponsors and a possible merger deal with another team continued right up until the end, Stapleton decided it was better to end the team rather than compromise the team's competitive and management legacy with something that wouldn't allow him to compete with the biggest and best teams in cycling.
“We decided the best thing to do was to release our athletes, staff and management to pursue other career options,” Stapleton said.
“It is in their best interest to go forward with their career options.”
Stapleton said the hunt for a new sponsor dated back to last year, and included talks with existing HTC sponsor, whose three-year deal expires at the end of the current season.
When negotiations with HTC stalled, talks with potential title sponsors and possible mergers with up to seven teams offered some hope the team could continue.
“We thought we had a partner that would have given us the necessary budget to operate the team on the same level as the past four years, but that deal collapsed Sunday night.
“It was right during my wife's 50th birthday dinner party. We had e-mails and phone calls,” Stapleton explained.
“We proceeded with other options. We ended our discussions with HTC last night. We decided that one final merger scenario would not succeed early this morning.”
Riders were informally told Monday they could start considering other options.
Cavendish on Tuesday told the BBC that he had already decided on a new team for next year.
The green jersey winner in Paris has been linked to Team Sky, but he was reportedly waiting for Stapleton to find a deal.
When a late-hour Stapleton deal looked increasingly unlikely, Cavendish pulled the trigger.
There is also growing speculation that Cavendish has reached a deal with GreenEDGE, but neither team backer Gerry Ryan or his son Andrew returned The Australian's phone calls this morning.
There was no official confirmation yet on where Cavendish is headed.
Stapleton expressed his frustration he was unable to “get it done” when it came to securing the team's financial future.
“It was becoming increasingly difficult to compete with what he called `super teams', such as the News Corporation-backed Team Sky out of the UK and Katusha, which boast budgets in excess of $20 million per season.
“We faced a tough dilemma,” Stapleton said.
“With the rise of the super teams, it was a question of having enough money to have the team be at a leadership level of the sport, and the need to bring in substantially more funds.
“The stakes of having a top team have changed. You have the haves and the have-nots, it's a destabilising factor in the sport. It was a factor in our decision-making process.
“We produced heavyweight results with a middleweight budget. We were very average in our budget.
“You can do that against people who are 50-per cent bigger than yours, but when it's 100-per cent more, with such a narrow talent pool, it becomes very difficult.
“If we couldn't be close enough with the financial power, and if we couldn’t be in a leadership position of the sport, we wouldn't be in position to drive change.”
Stapleton said he was hopeful that the team's top riders & staff, including media manager Kristy Scrymgouer, another Australian, would be able to find jobs within the professional peloton.
But the California-based Stapleton was still hopeful of keeping the women's program going next season.
“I'd like to come through for our girls,” Stapleton said.
“They deserve it and the signing schedule is a little different for women, so there is still some more time.”
Stapleton came into women's cycling in 2004, and the men's program two years later - largely to help salvage the scandal-plagued T-Mobile team.
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