Kazakhstan's Yerlik Sertay has reached the men's épée final of the 2026 FIE Westend Grand Prix in Budapest, taking silver after losing the gold-medal bout to Hungary's home favourite David Nagy, the Paris 2024 team-épée Olympic champion.
Sertay, who came through the FIE qualification group with a clean 6-0 record, ran one of the most demanding silver-medal paths of the year. He defeated Czech rising star Jakub Jurka 15-9 in the round of sixteen, then took down world No. 2 Gergely Siklósi of Hungary in the quarterfinals — the result of the night — before edging Swiss veteran Ian Hauri 15-12 in the semifinal.
Only Nagy stopped him. The Hungarian, who has had a quieter senior season after his Olympic gold last summer, found his level for the home crowd and used a more conservative second-line defence to control the rhythm of the bout.
For Kazakhstan, the silver continues a notable senior run for an épée programme that, until 2024, did not have a regular senior World Cup medallist. The country hosted its first-ever FIE Épée World Cup stage in Astana earlier this season — an event at which men's épée No. 1 Ruslan Kurbanov took silver — and Budapest now extends that momentum to a Grand Prix podium.
Sertay is the second Kazakh épéeist to reach a Grand Prix final at this level after Kurbanov's senior run earlier in the campaign. His personal trajectory inside the international Olympic build for Los Angeles 2028 is one of the federation's clearer signals of progress: a rapid rise through the back end of the FIE points list to a Grand Prix silver in a single season.
Hauri's bronze, the Swiss fencer's first senior Grand Prix medal of the year, came after a tactical semifinal in which Sertay's attacks on the preparation eventually broke through.
For Nagy, the home win is the confidence builder his senior season needed. The Hungarian had not added to his Olympic team gold with a senior individual title in 2025 and goes into the European Championships in Antony, France with the kind of result that re-anchors him as one of Europe's leading Olympic-champion épéeists.
The Westend Grand Prix is one of the headline stops on the men's épée Grand Prix calendar. Kazakhstan, which is now firmly inside the world ranking band that will help shape the senior team for the European-qualifier stage of the LA28 cycle, is expected to send a full senior squad through the remaining 2026 international calendar.
A senior Grand Prix silver in Budapest, with results over a world No. 2 and an Olympic semifinalist on the way through, is the kind of credential that follows a Kazakh fencer through the rest of the season. For Sertay and the country's broader épée programme, it is exactly the kind of marker the federation has been building towards since the launch of the Astana World Cup stage.
