Live streams, highlights and best-of clips from last month’s Digital Swiss 5 races drew more than one million views on social media.

The Digital Swiss 5 was the biggest virtual racing series to date involving elite professional cycling teams.

The world’s leading teams, 19 in total, went up against each other on the ROUVY indoor platform over courses used by the Tour de Suisse.

The 1.05 million video views for the five races were generated by 503,000 unique viewers who saw the video content generated by Velon and shared across the teams’ Facebook and Twitter channels.

Velon also produced the coverage which was shown by 20 broadcasters around the world, including BBC Sport in the UK, the Olympic Channel, L’Équipe in France and SBS in Australia. The TV audience numbers are captured separately from the online figures.

Watch highlights from all five races

Graham Bartlett, Velon CEO, said: “It was fantastic racing and great to see the return of real sport. Watching the teams go head-to-head and really fighting it out was so refreshing. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”

Joko Vogel, Tour de Suisse, said: “It was certainly a great success. On the one hand, we set up an event that had never been seen before in no time and we had a huge media presence worldwide.”

The races were also positively received by the professional riders who took part.

Mitchelton-SCOTT’s Michael Albasini said: “It’s nice that cycling is the first sport to deliver something different, something digital. We are the first sport that can deliver some entertainment for spectators.”

Groupama-FDJ rider Stefan Küng, who won two of the five races, added: “It’s quite impressive when you think some guys connected from South Africa, Australia, America, Europe, and we can all race together.”