It’s  just a rugby ball. Manufactured by Gilbert, with standard blue and green markings. But on November 22, 2003, the inert object now on display at the Henley River & Rowing Museum carried the charge of a nation’s yearning as it described a trajectory between two rugby posts - despatched through the Sydney night air by the right boot of the man whose signature it now bears: Jonny Wilkinson.

Albeit that the signature looks curiously like "Andy Watson",  the ball which Jonny drop-kicked to give England’s rugby union team its last-gasp World Cup final victory over Australia is, and will forever be, a potent sporting icon.

As it stands behind toughened glass in the Museum’s foyer, though, with children passing it en route to the Wind in the Willows exhibition, it looks, frankly, a bit scruffy and deflated. Very much down the social scale in comparison to its neighbour, the magnificent silver wedding cake that is Henley Royal Regatta’s Grand Challenge Cup.

Could this scrap of leather really have been at the centrepiece of one of the great sporting occasions of recent years? Could it really have been this scuffed object which Matt Dawson shepherded with such nerveless brinkmanship before releasing it for his outside half to turn himself into sporting legend?

Above the autograph, written in what one can only presume is the same hand, there is a schoolboyish inscription in dark blue ink: "Eng v Aus." As if anyone was likely to forget.

But if the history of this particular sporting artefact is widely known and celebrated, other items on display in the first of a series of 100 planned exhibitions entitled Our Sporting Life prompt memories of a less exalted, but no less worthy nature.

The idea of the scheme is to create what will effectively be a sporting road-show that will tour the museums of the country, supplementing a central core of national and international exhibits with local memorabilia, all the way through to 2012, when the best of the displays will form part of what will be the largest ever exhibition of Britain’s sporting heritage in the capital.

And one of the main aims of the whole initiative is not just to present local communities with their history, but to stimulate their own recollection and celebration of it.

Thus the inaugural exhibition includes a venerable number.10 shirt donated by Henley Rugby Club, whose history is documented, programmes and photographs detailing past triumphs of Henley Town FC and, as you would expect, a wealth of rowing memorabilia from Leander and other local clubs.

Ben Hunt-Davis, a local member of the British eight that took gold at the Sydney 2000 Olympics, has lent his medal to the exhibition.

The achievements of another local, double Paralympics swimming gold medallist Graham Edmunds (pictured), are also detailed.

Edmunds is one of around 15 local sporting figures whose recollections can be heard at the press of a button. He makes fairly brief mention of the motorbike accident he suffered in 2000 which turned him from a talented swimmer, who spent his spare time coaching disabled swimmers, into someone so badly injured that he was advised he might never walk again.

Elsewhere in the exhibition one can read that two teams of surgeons worked for five hours trying to save and reconstruct his shattered legs.

"I spent 10 years working with guys who were very, very badly physically and mentally disabled. So unlike most disabled athletes, I knew all about disabled sport before I became disabled myself," he says, before going on to describe how it was only at the insistence of one of the disabled swimmers he had coached, a young man with Down’s Syndrome, that he started trying to walk again.

"He said to me: ‘No pain, no gain. No pain, no gain. Come on! Walk to me...’," Edmunds recalls, adding that he rejoined some of his former charges in the local pool and started to progress from wading to swimming.

After receiving a disabled classification of S10, the category for the least disabled group, Edmunds won gold in the Athens 2004 Paralympics 4x100m relay in a time that lowered the world record by seven seconds.

Four years later the same quartet took another seven seconds off the record in defending their title at the Beijing Paralympics.

Here is a story which stands at the heart of the exhibition, linking local and international achievement.

While the rugby ball in the foyer is emblematic of a huge and passionate sporting contest, the words of Graham Edmunds speak more clearly about the nature of courage and sporting endeavour.

But, hey, you don’t have to choose. Just embrace the whole package if and when it comes your way...

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames