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FORT COLLINS, Colo. (VN)_ Five of the world’s top 18 squads will take to the roads of Colorado for the inaugural Quiznos Pro Challenge in 2011. Race organizers announced Wednesday that Team RadioShack, Liquigas-Cannondale, HTC-HighRoad, Garmin-Cervelo and BMC Racing will start the week-long, UCI 2.1 stage race on August 22.

“Our goal is to connect new audiences in America with the sport of professional cycling; having several of the premier international teams already signed up is a huge step in that direction,” said general manager Ellen Kramer.

Each of the five ProTeam licensed squads holds domestic interests, four of them registered in the U.S. Italian-registered Liquigas-Cannondale has signed Americans Tim Duggan and Ted King. The Garmin-Cervelo squad, based in Boulder, Colorado, was the third-ranked team in the UCI’s recently published sporting hierarchy and includes world champion Thor Hushovd.

RadioShack’s Levi Leipheimer rang off three Amgen Tour of California wins between 2007 and 2009 and HTC-HighRoad’s Michael Rogers stood atop the final ATOC podium in 2010. Leipheimer recently told VeloNews that he is interested in taking the start in Colorado Springs, while Rogers left HTC in the off-season for Team Sky. Another rider looking to the QPC startline is BMC’s George Hincapie, who has expressed his desire to ride in the first-year event in what may be the multiple-time U.S. road champion’s final season.

Race organizers at Medalist Sports continue to review Pro Continental and Continental teams ahead of an expanded invitation announcement. “We have had so many ProTour and Pro Continental teams lining up to compete in Colorado next year,” said Jim Birrell, Managing Partner of Medalist Sports. “Signing teams of this caliber is a key indication that the Quiznos Pro Challenge will be one of the preeminent professional cycling events in the world.”

The inaugural Quiznos Pro Challenge will take place August 22-28, 2011 in Colorado.

Editor’s Note: Brian Holcombe is a reporter with VeloNews. He covers all things racing in the U.S. and has been accused of attacking too much on the VN lunch ride.

After a week of outdoor island adventure, the 2011 Garmin-Cervélo team bonding camp wrapped up Saturday on Grand Cayman Island.

Garmin-Cervélo Camp 2010: After the merger, riders from both squads get a chance to ride as one team.

Held at posh beachside resort The Reef, the weeklong gathering included scuba diving, golf, stingrays, volleyball, helicopter rides, a scavenger hunt and a trip on a submarine — shared experiences intended to smooth the merger between Garmin-Transitions and the Cervélo TestTeam, which folded earlier this year when it could not land a title sponsor.

Seven riders came across from Cervélo to Jonathan Vaughters’ Slipstream Sports organization, including world road champion Thor Hushovd; also coming across were Cervélo’s bikes, clothing sponsor Castelli and component sponsors SRAM and Rotor.

Riders from the Garmin-Cervélo women’s team, which Slipstream acquired in the merger, were not on Grand Cayman; neither were riders from Slipstream’s long-running U.S.-based under-23 development team.

Also absent from the camp were Aussies Jack Bobridge and Cameron Meyer, who were competing on the velodrome at the December 2-4 Melbourne World Cup, as well as Irishman Dan Martin, who recently underwent sinus surgery to alleviate persistent allergy problems. Brazilian Murilo Fischer was also absent.

The goal of the camp was to forge friendships and a sense of allegiance between former rivals, particularly among sprinters and classics riders.

“We are here having a good time, but there is a purpose,” Farrar said. “Doing stuff like this brings guys together in ways that would be hard to do if we were to just get together in January for a training camp. You have two large, closely knit groups coming together. You can’t snap your fingers and have guys become friends the way we have, or they have, over two or three years. But this gets the process started in a fun setting. We’re all doing things most of us have never done, and no one is comfortable with, so that helps break the ice a little bit.”

Of the Cervélo riders coming over to Garmin, Hushovd, Heinrich Haussler, Roger Hammond and Andreas Klier are podium finishers at either the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix or Gent-Wevelgem. Aussie workhorse Brett Lancaster brings additional power for sprint lead-outs.

Add to those names returning Garmin strongmen such as Farrar, Fisher, Julian Dean, Martijn Maaskant, David Millar and Johan Van Summeren, and the Garmin-Cervélo squad appears, on paper, to be the strongest classics team in the world, with arguably the strongest lead-out train as well.

“The biggest thing in the classics is numbers,” Farrar said. “The advantage to being on the strongest team is having as many guys in the final selection as possible. It’s better to have four or five guys in the final who are pretty good, rather than one guy there who is really good but with no one to help him.”

Vaughters was also beaming about signing 20-year-old Belgian Sep Vanmarcke, who finished second at the 2010 Gent-Wevelgem riding for Topsport-Vlaanderen as a neo-pro. “I would say he’s the most talented young classic rider in the world, by a long shot,” Vaughters said.

For the general classification, the team will look to Vande Velde and Hesjedal at the Tour de France, with Martin pegged for the Giro d’Italia.

“I still have a lot of faith in Christian Vande Velde,” Vaughters said. “I think he will be back at the next level, and Ryder Hesjedal is our wild card.”

Tom Danielson, Dave Zabriskie, Tom Peterson and former FDJ rider Christophe Le Mevel all expected to target the classification at specific stage races.

Danielson said he hopes 2011 is the year he finally earns a spot on a Tour team, while Vaughters said Danielson and Peter Stetina, both high-altitude specialists from Colorado, would likely be the team’s GC leaders at the Quiznos Challenge in August.

New recruit Andrew Talansky, a 20-year-old neo-pro who began 2010 with California Giant Berry Farms-Specialized and ended the season second overall at the Tour de l’Avenir, will be given opportunities to test himself on the general classification as well.

Vaughters said an ideal 2011 season would include at least one win at cycling’s five monuments, as well victory in the Tour de France’s team time trial, time spent in the maillot jaune, and the green points jersey in Paris.

It’s perhaps for that reason that both Haussler and Klier said they have no intention of racing next year’s Tour — between sprinters, GC leaders and TT specialists, Tour team selection, like with the classics squad, will be difficult.

“It will be hard to make the Tour team, and there are so many good riders on this team, I don’t want to deal with the stress,” said Haussler, who won a Tour stage in 2009 but missed the first half of the 2010 season due to a knee injury, and was forced to skip the Tour after a crash with Mark Cavendish at the Tour de Suisse. “I only had 25 race days in 2010 and I need to get back into the form I had in 2009. Instead of the Tour, I’ll focus on the classics, and I’ll race the Vuelta to prepare for the world championships.”

Garmin-Cervélo Camp 2010: Thor Hushovd checks out the scene from the air.

As for the green jersey, Hushovd said he would have no problem riding to help Farrar.

“I’ve tried for the green jersey many times in my career, and I’ve managed to win it twice,” Hushovd said. “But to be honest, in 2011 I prefer to wear my rainbow jersey at the Tour. Besides, you have to look back two or three years for the last time I beat Mark Cavendish in a flat field sprint. I don’t want to sprint for second, third or fourth. I prefer to choose a few stages that are better suited for me, and on days that are for Tyler, I am happy to help him.”

It wasn’t all fun and games on Grand Cayman. Riders were also given 3D bike fits, were sized for custom clothing, and met individually with team director Matt White to discuss their 2011 race schedules.

“This team is full of talent in certain areas, that’s for sure,” White said. “It’s a mixed blessing. It’s not always going to be smooth sailing. There may be a few tricky situations, but you can always work out a solution.”

The remaining 18 riders from the 2010 Garmin-Transitions team also spent the week getting accustomed to equipment changes, with Cervélo replacing Felt frame geometry, and SRAM shifting replacing Shimano.

“When you have ridden the same set up for three years, it takes a little while to get used to,” Farrar said. “But that’s why we get the bikes in November. It gives us the whole winter to train and get used to it before jumping into a race. It may take a week or two to get used to some of the nuances, and you have to re-train your brain a little, but it doesn’t take long to make the switch.”

For Vande Velde and Dave Zabriskie, the merger sees them reunited with Cervélo; they both rode the Canadian manufacturers’ frames while riding at Team CSC.

There were other reunions on the new team: Hesjedal and Hammond rode as teammates at Discovery Channel in 2005, and Hushovd and Vaughters were teammates at Crédit Agricole for three years, from 2000 to 2002.

“I did Thor’s first race with him as a pro, and his first team camp,” Vaughters said. “I always really liked Thor a lot. He’s one of those guys I was always in awe of his talent, and his good nature, and he’s been that way since day one.”

Other relationships were sprung from the camp. Danielson said conversations with Klier reminded him of exposure to Chris Horner during the early days of his career on the domestic Saturn squad.

“I never knew Andreas Klier, but he speaks the language of cycling as if it’s slang,” Danielson said. “He can communicate difficult things so simply, the guy can see every race situation. He reminds me of Chris Horner, how he’s able to communicate with sprinters, climbers and classics guys. I want to be a sponge around him and absorb as much as I can.”

And Danielson said he expects the union of the Garmin and Cervélo teams to create a whole that is greater than its sum parts.

“This team will be more successful than people think,” he said. “It’s not just that we signed some great classics guys. I see those guys as filling roles we were missing, rather than knocking heads with guys in roles we already had.”

Garmin-Cervélo’s 2011 international road season began earlier this week — on Grand Cayman Island, of all places.

There was no racing, and the newly merged team hasn’t yet been issued 2011 clothing, but at the outset of the meet-and-greet camp, team manager Jonathan Vaughters gave his riders an opening “mission statement” speech that specified the team’s longstanding drug-free philosophy, as well as its objectives for next year.

Atop that list of objectives is to be the number-one ranked team in the world by the end of the 2011 season, Vaughters said. (The team heads into the season not far off, ranked third in the UCI’s “sporting criteria rankings,” behind The Luxembourg Cycling Project and Rabobank. On the UCI World Ranking, Garmin-Transitions was seventh and Cervelo TestTeam was 12th in 2010)

“You can become the top team in the world a lot of different ways,” Vaughters said. “Whether it’s winning one-day classics, or doing well at grand tours, or both, there are a lot of ways to get there. But the focus is to win races all year long.”

In order to make that happen, Vaughters brought his new team together on Grand Cayman Island for a weeklong team-bonding camp that includes daily 80km training rides and island activities such as beach volleyball, snorkeling and a treasure hunt.

It’s the team’s first official gathering, bringing together longtime Garmin riders Tyler Farrar, Ryder Hesjedal, Christian Vande Velde, David Zabriskie and David Millar with several riders coming over from Cervélo, including newly crowned world road champion Thor Hushovd as well as Heinrich Haussler, Roger Hammond and Brett Lancaster, among others. Also new to the team is promising young American signing Andrew Talansky.

And what might sound like pampered professional athletes frolicking in a Caribbean paradise over the off-season is actually an important first step in building camaraderie for the trench warfare of European road racing, Vaughters said.

“When we brought on the guys from Cervélo, I knew we needed to do something similar to our previous team-bonding camps in Boulder, Colorado,” he said. “It’s not just two or three new riders next year: we’ve got 11 new riders total. It was important to get everyone together.”

The inspiration to hold the camp on Grand Cayman began with Garmin rider Peter Stetina, whose girlfriend’s family lives on the island. Over his visits Stetina made acquaintance with Tom McCallum, an island resident and cycling fan who in turn invited Vaughters for a visit.

“Tom had invited me to come, to do a talk or a clinic with the local cycling club here,” Vaughters said. “Once I realized we needed to have a team bonding camp I asked him, ‘How about I bring 50 people with me?’ We batted the idea around, he got support from the local tourism board, hotels and cycling club, and it got to the point where it was affordable for us. He did a great job pulling together sponsors and government support for us to have fun in the sun for a week.”

So far Vaughters said the highlight was visiting Stingray City, a mating ground for stingrays.

“You can touch them and pet them, and they don’t sting you unless you step on them,” Vaughters said. “No one got stung, but Christian came up and pinched Dave Zabriskie in the leg; he really thought it was a stingray and jumped into Christian’s arms like a little girl. That was pretty funny.”

On Thursday the team will participate in an event titled Ride with the Pros, allowing participants to ride alongside the team. In the evening, the team will attend a charity auction where several team bikes will be up for bid; proceeds from the auction will support the Cayman Islands Cancer Society.

VeloNews will report on both events, as well as post photos and interviews from all the team’s top riders and management.

Slipstream Sports, LLC, the owner and manager of the Garmin-Cervelo team, released a photo of the team’s 2011 team kit on Monday.

The Castelli-made jersey has large black and white panels reminiscent of the Cervelo TestTeam kit, along with Garmin’s trademark blue accents and an argyle stripe on the sleeves. Slipstream is taking pre-orders for the kit on its team website.

Related: Pearl Izumi sues Garmin to get skinsuits back.

João Correia ? the American/Portuguese rider who made the remarkable journey from the publishing world of New York City to the heart of the European peloton ? will not be racing next season across the Atlantic.

Correia, 35, told the Portuguese wire service Lusa that he will not race next season in Europe due to a lack of serious offers from teams.

“I will not race for just any price,” Correia told Lusa. He had mentioned on his Twitter site that he’s returning to New York and he reflected on his final race with Cervélo on his latest entry on his personal Website.

Correia was one of the most interesting stories in 2010 after signing with top-level team Cervélo. He hadn’t raced in 10 years when he started to seriously train and drop some serious weight. He left behind a publishing job to sign with Bissell midway through 2008. He continued with the U.S. domestic team last season before being picked up by Cervélo.

He admitted he was signed just as much for his intriguing storyline than his outright racing abilities.

“The team didn’t sign me to win races, they signed me because they liked my story and wanted to help me develop,” he told Lusa. “In that respect, I think I gave the team more publicity than any rider, except Thor (Hushovd) and Carlos (Sastre).”

Correia made his season debut with 94th at Etoille de Besseges in February and completed both the Volta a Catalunya and the Vuelta a Castilla y Leon. He did not finish the Tour of California or the Tour de Suisse, and finished out his season with 152nd in Paris-Bruxelles.

Correia is among a handful of Cervélo riders who have not been able to land a contract following the decision to merge the team with Garmin next season.

Nearly all the team has landed rides. The only others still looking include Spanish riders Xavier Florencio, Joaquim Novoa and Inigo Cuesta, 41, who hopes to ride an 18th Vuelta a España next season before retiring.