Hello,

Distortion will be greatly reduced in many cases if you take a few extra steps initially.

Once you have drawn the center spine of your cable use the Unwrap Curve plugin on the forum and unwrap the center line curve.
Align the unwrapped curve along a major axis.
Create the shrink wrap object and modify/scale accordingly, snapping to both ends of the unwrapped curve.
Flow the object along the center spine curve.

It would be useful to have a plugin which would call for a specific length of curve, allowing one to bend and modify that curve while keeping the length locked, but I'm not sure that will ever happen.