Critical commentary: Decolonising tertiary sport science education through CSP3

Across myriad sport and physical education contexts, the celebratory rhetoric of diversity, inclusion, and integration is performed, yet systemic inequities remain obscured and largely unchallenged. Informed by lived and scholarly engagements with marginalisation, this analysis forgoes rendering critique palatable to those in positions of power and privilege; rather, it seeks to illuminate inequitable systemic conditions and thereby open them to interrogation. In the German context, Gleichheit and Gleichstellung , while politically significant, fall short of addressing historically produced asymmetries of privilege and power. Without critical interrogation of power, privilege, whiteness, and colonial epistemic assumptions, tertiary sport science education continues to prepare graduates to reproduce the very inequities which Gleichheit and Gleichstellung are intended to redress. The analysis positions tertiary sport science education as a critical site of intervention, advancing an integrated CSP3 framework grounded in critical race theory, intersectionality, cultural humility, and third-wave positive psychology. This framework conceptualises equity as a precondition for sustainable wellbeing, belonging, and professional responsibility. By linking epistemic justice, pedagogical transformation, and structurally situated wellbeing, the analysis outlines a pathway for decolonising tertiary sport science education. This pathway requires epistemic plurality, incorporating knowledge systems and practices from marginalised communities whilst fostering critical awareness of—and resistance to—Eurocentric monopolies on what constitutes legitimate sport science insight and practice. It requires curricula which compel future practitioners to identify, analyse, and disrupt the power dynamics their coaching, consulting, teaching, and research practices will otherwise reproduce. It requires embedding such measures so equitable initiatives become reality rather than remain aspirational rhetoric.