Olympic gold medalist Jessica Fox used a condom to repair her kayak before competing

Jessica Fox of Team Australia in the Women’s canoe slamom final at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. Harry How/Getty Images

Olympic athlete Jessica Fox shared an unexpected hack that she uses to repair damaged kayaks – and it involves a condom.

The 27-year-old Australian athlete shared a short TikTok video with her 18,000 followers at the start of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, which began on July 23. The video – which has 47,000 views at the time of writing – showed her team repairing the damaged nose of her kayak by using a condom to secure a malleable carbon into place.

“Bet you never knew condoms could be used for kayak repairs,” Fox captioned her video ahead of the games, adding that the condom’s stretchy latex gives the carbon a “smooth finish.”

Since she posted the hack, Fox has secured a bronze medal in the K1 canoe slalom final and took gold in the women’s slalom C1 canoe slalom after beating British silver medalist Mallory Franklin by three seconds, 7news reported.

The contraceptive Fox used for the repair was likely one of an estimated 160,000 condoms that Japanese organizers provided to athletes staying in the Olympic Village to ensure that the games are “safe and secure,” according to The Guardian.

Despite Olympic organizers providing athletes with condoms, the International Olympic Committee told them to “avoid unnecessary forms of physical contact such as hugs, high-fives and handshakes,” according to page 24 of the Olympic handbook, which was released in February 2021.

As Insider’s Katie Warren reported at the time, a lot of people online were quick to point out the contradictory messaging about close contact at the games.

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