Yu-Na Kim built up a lead in what has been reported as a brilliant short program at the Four Continents Championships on Wednesday, which helped her win the competition despite some long program errors last night. Joannie Rochette of Canada was second, coming in second in both the short and long programs, and Mao Asada battled back to third with a long program win after a bit of a disastrous short program.

In a bright spot for the American contingent, Caroline Zhang (who will not be at the World Championships) finished fourth and was credited with six triples on a night when many skaters made major errors and had downgrades. Rachael Flatt was 7th, while Alissa Czisny was 9th. For those of you doing the calculation, that's 16, and the American ladies need their scores to combine to no worse than 13 in order to get 3 spots at the Olympics next year. Considering that this competition didn't even include the European ladies, I would have to predict (as has been guessed by most others already) that there are only going to be two highly coveted spots for the U.S. pixies to battle for next year. I hope I'm wrong!