Gordeeva and Grinkov won almost every competition they entered. In the 31 competitions whose results are known at the senior and professional levels, they finished first 24 times and never lower than second place from the time they won their first senior world title. They are one of the few pair teams in history to successfully complete a quadruple twist lift in international competition. They landed the difficult element with ease at the 1987 World Championships. They also completed the element at the 1987 European Championships, but due to a problem with Grinkov's boot strap and a misunderstanding about the rules (the referee signaled them to stop, going so far as to turn off their music, but they continued skating), they were disqualified from that event. They stopped performing the quad twist because it made no significant improvement to their marks, making the added physical stress unnecessary. Katia writes in her book, "My Sergei: A Love Story," that this element raised her heart rate and blood pressure to levels that alarmed the Soviet team's doctors. "That summer we had learned a very difficult move called the quadruple split twist," she wrote, "in which Sergei threw me in the air, I did a split, then closed my legs and made four turns before he caught me. We were the only pair to do this quadruple element, and it was very exhausting—more exhausting than difficult, really. Soviet doctors had measured my pulse rate as exceeding two hundred beats per minute when I did it."